a16z Podcast - On Mentorship and Leadership

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Behind many great leaders, you’ll usually find a great mentor. The mentor-mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have, in both their careers and in their lives. So how do you find a mentor? What are different kinds of mentorship? And how can it help you break into an industry – or help others break in themselves?In this episode from July 2018, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz discusses mentorship with his mentor, Silicon Valley pioneer Ken Coleman, and Ben’s mentee, Michel Feaster, founder of Usermind and now Chief Product Officer at Qualtrics. They begin with their personal journeys and share advice and frameworks for mentorship, leadership, and growing as a founder.

Behind many great leaders, you'll usually find a great mentor. The mentor-mente relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have in both their careers and in their lives. The mentor-mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have in both their careers and in their lives. So how do you find a mentor? What are different kinds of mentorship? And how can it help you break into an industry, or help others break in themselves. In this episode from July 2018, A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz discusses mentorship with his mentor, Silicon Valley pioneer Ken Coleman, and Ben's mentee, Michelle Feaster, founder of UserMind and now Chief Product Officer at Qualtricks.

They begin with their personal journeys and share advice and frameworks for mentorship, leadership, and growing as a founder and CEO. Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today's episode is all about mentors and mentees. The discussion takes place between A6 and Z co-founder Ben Horowitz and his mentor, Ken Coleman, who started his career at HP and then Activision, was later chairman of acceleris and is on multiple other boards, and held several executive positions at Silicon Graphics in between.

It's based on a Q&A that took place at an event we hosted in May 20, and the discussion is moderated by Michelle Feister, herself a mentee of Benz. She was formally at HP and then Apdeo and is now the CEO and co-founder of Usermind. You can also hear her insights on creating a category from pricing to positioning in a previous episode, which you can find at A6&Z.com slash podcasts. But today's episode covers everything about mentors and mentees, from how to break into a particular industry or company, to how to help up-and-comers of all backgrounds, to the most annoying and best things between mentors and mentees. But the conversation begins with how they found each other. Ben, how did you

and Ken meet? I love to hear that one. That's an interesting story. So my father who had, I grew up in Berkeley, my father was like a, I don't know how to describe them, like a political rabble-rouser intellectual kind of thing, but no like connection to corporate America. My mom was a nurse and, you know, I'm trying to get a job coming out of school. And so, you know, I asked my, you know, did he know anybody who, like, worked in technology? And he said, well, you know, I was at this yoga class. And one of the women at yoga class, she's married to this guy who runs a tech company. And the woman was Sanger McCracken, and the man was Ed McCracken, and the company was Silicon Graphics.

He got Sanya to ask Ed if he would look at me as a summer intern. And Ed, of course, wasn't going to deal with that, so he gave it to Ken. As you do. And, you know, Kent followed up, which, you know, I say in a lot of companies, that follow-up doesn't even happen. He followed up and gave me that summer internship. And that was in 1987. Why did you follow up? Well, I think there's an overreliance on resumes and experience.

And people missed what's really important in success with just skills, abilities, and personal attributes. And I thought he was a smart kid at those days. I thought he had just enough of an edge on him to be interesting. He had a drive, and I thought he had the personality to do interesting things. And in those days, we were looking for people at SGI who were going to do interesting things because we were creating new technology. Yeah. By the way, that's been part of my life experience is that I think the people who become the best mentors see past

your resume and see something inside you that they connect with. Certainly I feel like that's what happened with us. That's a good point. And so I think when you're looking for mentors, knowing whether that person has that approach to the people that they're encountering, I think it's a core part of finding your memory. And vice versa. Yeah. The mentee has to take that approach.

I find it fascinating that a manager who's five years out of school recruiting somebody and puts a spec together for 15 years of experience. I just find it weird and they had to go to Stanford even though the manager then yeah yeah so I'm interested Ben so how did your relationship change over time how did it go from the initial kind of meeting and getting the opportunity to really becoming a more important figure in your life

yeah well so you know one thing that I think is actually important in retrospect is you know as soon as I got in the company like people knew why I got the interview. That's not something that stays secret. Okay, you come in through like Ed McCrack and then Ken Coleman. And like Ken was literally, I think, six levels up the org chart from me. Like it was a big, big distance. So people know that.

And what that said to me wasn't, oh, I'm a maid guy. What that said to me is like I cannot embarrass Ken. I have to be better than everybody expects me to. I got to work twice as hard. I got to keep grinding. And that's really how the relationship. I just went in there and worked as hard as I possibly could. Because I knew somebody was going to say something to him.

It was either going to be good or bad. And I wanted it to be good. And that's really how it got started. Yeah. I totally relate to that. It's funny. I was telling some people. I speak a lot in public, but I was nervous before coming up on stage tonight.

And I was telling everybody I didn't want to embarrass you. Yeah. There you go. And it was that same feeling. And I think, you know, it was really, I was super grateful for the job. I mean, at that time, I had no idea how to get. get into Silicon Valley. I was coming from, you know, outer space as far as I could tell. Yeah, yeah. So figuring out a way to get in, not necessarily coming in through the front door.

You know, I'd love kind of your, I think it's a really important point. Companies put together systems and processes, and unfortunately, about 10, sometimes up to 20% of the time, that process makes no sense. It's just not helpful. And so what you want to do in a company is people who can do what I call intelligent override. The problem is most companies don't have many people like that who will do intelligent override. And so if you let the system dictate to you whether you'll get an opportunity or not, you'll probably won't get that opportunity. You can't take it personally and you need to figure out how to deal with that with intelligent override. And if you're interacting with the company, you've got to figure out how to go through the side door rather than have the system keep you for getting an opportunity.

I'm always impressed with people who are persistent who will try different things. You know, I admire those kind of people. And you figure out if they'll do that to get an interview, they might do that to get a customer or solve a problem. Yeah, so that's a really interesting point. It's a little bit of a qualifying test to see if you can actually find the side door. And actually, venture capital works very much like that, and that you hear people complain about, well, I don't know any VC's.

so I can't get my company funded. Well, if you're going to be an entrepreneur and build a company, you know, scrape and get customers and figure out how to build a product and hire people, you better be able to find the side door. Because you can't do that. Like, that's actually an essential skill for that job. Part of it is, you know, is the person inclined to mentor, but the other pieces, does that mentor see something in you,

that persistence or that drive and that hustle that makes them want to take their time and spend it? You know, it's interesting. I was reflecting on mentorship and mentors. in my life. You know, most of them have been unexpected. You know, if you asked me to plan my life forward, I would never have imagined I'd be sitting here, that you'd be my mentor, that I would necessarily be a founder. So I'd love to hear from both of you, like, who have been the unexpected mentors in your life? My first mentor in technology was a guy that most of you probably haven't heard of. His name was Howard Smith. Before Silicon Graphics, we recruited Howard to

HP. And I learned more about how to manage engineering from him than anybody. And we used to go to a place called Red Coach, and I used to drink Scots. I'd talk about management and leadership and that kind of stuff, and he would talk about engineering, how you manage engineering, how do you identify engineering people? And I just went to school on him. And that was a very important relationship. And my point there, you can have a peer as a mentor, because we were peers. I didn't work for him.

He didn't work for me. I think every mentor I've had has been unexpected, including can. Ken, who I, like, I would never have expected, Ken to be my mentor, even, like, when I got the job. That was just, he was so senior to me at the time. But, like, one of the more unusual ones is very early in my career, I read a book called High Output Management by Andy Grove. And, you know, I thought it was the best book I'd read in business. Yeah, first book I gave you. If I've given any of you a book, it's probably that one.

And, you know, I read all his books, and I studied him, and, you know, I thought he was, wow, this guy is such. a great CEO and he knows how to break down management in the right way. And, you know, over the years, I met him a couple of times. But in my mind, he was always my mentor. And the really crazy thing about that story is very, very many years later towards the end of Andy's life. He called me up. He said, they're doing a new addition to high output management. I want you to write the forward. And I was like, wow, why me? And he said, you know, I watched this talk you gave at Stanford on your book. and they asked you, you know, why you wrote it. And you said, when I was a kid, Andy Grove wrote this book.

And I couldn't even understand why the CEO of Intel would write a how-to book on management. Like, there is no reason for him to do that other than, you know, to help people like me. And so I thought, if I ever get to any level near what he got to, I will try and do something like that. And then he said, I read the book. And like, it's pretty good, which from Andy Grove, that's a good compliment. And so it was just like a very unusual. unusual mentor, mentee relationship for me. And I think forward to that book is my favorite thing that I've ever written. So mentoring founders, right? That's a unique thing. Can you talk about

transitioning? Like, how do you mentor a founder? How do you see them transitioning from founders to successful CEOs? I've been thinking about that a lot recently as I've worked with founders trying to build companies. And I'll be interested in what Ben has to say about this also. But there's a difference when there are five of you or eight of you or ten of you when there's 500 of you or thousand of you. And the person's job who changes the most in a growing environment is a CEO shot, the guy at the top, a woman at the top. 100%. And that's a tough journey. That's a really difficult, complex journey, you know, because when you're up to about 125 people, you're the CEO, you're the leader of the company, can know everybody. When you got 500 people,

everybody knows you and you don't know a very small part of the company. One of the first thing that happens when you go to that transition, you realize I didn't know so much about X because I now have an expert. I always remember when I hired a general counselor work for me, I said, wait a minute, what's my value proposition to a guy's going to know more about legal than I'll ever know? Confronting that reality that it is a really, a different job. It's really important. You know, like when I was CEO, I would sometimes just give somebody instruction. You've got to do it this way. But you can't do that as a CEO mentor. And it is complicated at times because you will know the answer and you have to have the discipline to not

go all the way through. So Ben was my mentor before I became a CEO. So, you know, when I was an executive and kind of a middle-level product person and has stayed in my life, you know, since I made the transition to founder and CEO, I find two things very fascinating about. how you mentor me. One, you know, it's a lot of questions, but two, you've known me so long that I feel like you have a sense for how I'm going to react. And sometimes your questions are to like snap me out of an emotional state that I'm in and get me to engage more intellectually, you know, with the problem I'm solving. I mean, do you think that relationship, mentoring is as core to it as like the fact that you've both been CEOs and so you know how to ask the right

questions? It's hard to advise people on how to do this. It really does get at what you're talking about it's there's no real generic advice that works you can't say it you know it's for that person in that situation based on what they're feeling and so much of that job is so emotional and so much of when they screw it up they're so afraid of the dark place that they put themselves in a dark place that was my phone call to ben last week you have to be a good listener you have to be able to ask good questions and I can tell a lot about ability to be helpful two things one is how self-aware is a person? The person has a sense of who they are,

what their blind spots are. That's one. Two is there's somebody, and you make a point, he always has the answer. He's figured it out before you can ask the question. Well, nobody's always figured it out. And so when somebody like that,

it's going to be really hard to come to grips with an issue. So the people that can grow the most are people when you have a conversation today and you talk to them a week from today, and they've done something with the conversation. Not the necessarily that he did what I might have done, but they've done something.

Because I always fascinating, if I meet any of you or executives or managers, and I ask you a question to walk me through your team, always like everybody will have somebody on a team. I say, given what you just said to me, why is that person working for you? Given what, not what I said, it's what you said. And so it's just being a mirror.

to what somebody said can be quite helpful that person. Now, they can choose not to deal with it, but they can't deny that they said it. I didn't say that, you know. All three of us are kind of walking representations for the power of mentorship in our lives. And so I think everyone here is going to walk out of their thinking, I want a mentor.

Maybe they came in here wanting a mentor. But I think it's hard to find. What advice would you give? How do people network or cultivate these kinds of life-changing relationships. I feel strongly that networking is an undervalued skill in the world. So I believe you should be about getting to know more and more people. And the mentorship happens organically as you get to know people because you can't make somebody be a mentor. And for it to work, that relationship, there has to be trust. And you've got to be willing to

hear if you're a mentee, something that you don't want to hear. And then for the mentor, I got to feel like it's worth the journey, you know, that there's a chemistry as worth the time and effort to spend with somebody. And so it's, you got a date and see if it happens. If you're trying to develop a relation with somebody of how do you stay engaged without being a pest? There's a skill there or a sense there. If you just pull away and don't stay in contact, that doesn't work. But if you're a pest, that is a person. work. So you've got to have the sensibility to how much is enough so that I maintain a relationship or build a relationship, but not be a pest. Then you guys seem verified on rap genius. Like the rapper

explains his own lyrics. So GZ did one. And it's a great explanation of kind of mentorship, because it's really like people like, you know, he's an established rapper. So people want to have GZ as a mentor. And he says, look, I don't have. hang a lot of rappers because I feel like rappers are fake. I dress up in their Halloween costumes and, you know, they're always trying to pretend to be somebody. He says, I like to hang around with genuine motherfuckers like somebody who will call you on your birthday or, you know, call to check in on you. And to me, that really got at it in that, look, it's a relationship and it's got to be a relationship where there's value going in both directions where, you know, you're actually

interested in that person, not in what you can get out of them. I totally agree. I've mentored people who've worked for me and mentored people who just got intro to me, you know, friends, kids. And I think some of it's chemistry. And some of it is like, do I just admire their grit and determination? You know, do they come to me prepared and they, you know, ask me questions and don't waste my time? And then do we, you know, meet enough times to actually develop a relationship? So I think, you know, you can't make it happen. You can't force that. Right. There is some core element of chemistry to it. So you both talked about mentorship as a two-way street, right, where you're giving to the mentee and you're also learning from them. I'd love to hear, you know, what lesson or piece of advice that you learned from one of your mentees that kind of changed your point of view on the world. Well, I'll tell you one right here. Ben has started Oxford before I started a company, and I used to go meet with Ben and Mark regularly. Tell me about what you guys have learned. What were the tripwires you were chipped over?

Tripped over a lot of them. And so I got from him on their journey that helped me deal with my journey. So I think you can learn something from anybody. And if it's not a two-way street, it doesn't work very well. I learn a lot from everybody that I work with. And you learn different kinds of things. So one of the best CEOs I work with is a really, really remarkable CEO. and one thing is just his relentless sense of what the standard has to be at his company

in terms of how good you have to be to work there, how good the processes have to be. He's always going like, are we the best company that you have at, like, Agile Development? Who's better? He always wants to know that constantly, and he's always kind of meeting people and seeing, like, how his team stacks up and really, really trying to be the best possible. There is somebody I mentor a long time. I learned something very powerful for him. Every time you meet with this guy, he always ends with what can I do for you?

It's fast. It's disarming. And you feel, wow, he cares. He cares about how he can help me. I just find that a very powerful way to end the conversation. Yeah. Yeah, I've certainly been changed by both. my mentors and my life and the people I've mentored.

Can I love to know, what was your experience like, you know, when you first got to the valley and how is diversity changed over the course of your time here? That's an interesting question. I get that a lot. You know, when I got here, there were very few African-Americans in technology. I never thought about it quite that way. I thought about achieving, making a difference, being successful, having a challenge. And in my generation, generation, life was going to be hard, and I had to be better than my white counterparts. That was just an his, an accepted reality. And there's a book I read in college that most of you probably never heard on it.

I'm sure it's not in printing anymore. I go five smooth stones. And this is a really affected way I do my life as a black male. And this black kid in New Orleans, and he had a mentor, and he was going to college in Ohio, and his mentor said this, you're going to go to school in Ohio, and you find prejudice and discrimination, but don't look under the bed for it. What that means is, if you're black in this country, or you're female, or if you're different, you're not majority, there are some people that won't appreciate you. and will discriminate you because of that fact. But if you spend your life looking for it, you can't be successful.

You can't win. You can't even afford to make an excuse for yourself. You can't be stupid about it. You can't be naive. The world is what it is. And some people will do bad things because of that. But you've got to move on. You can't get bogged down with it.

Now, I tell my close white friends have to be careful, no matter how liberal you are, you never have to ask yourself this question. Did this happen to me because I was black? You never have to ask that question. And there's a different experience that you have to appreciate that. You know, in hindsight, I powered through. I wasn't looking for excuses, and I was just trying to achieve. And then I tried to bring people along with me and force organizations to deal with themselves

and understand what they're doing. doing. If you take a simple thing as, I'd said earlier, an over-reliance of experience. If you overly rely on experience and not on skills, abilities, and personal attributes, you can cut out women and minorities who might not have lots of experience. I didn't find it lonely to be an early black person in this business. I just was trying to win, make a difference, be challenged. worry about, I'm finding that a number of DNI people have the job, but no power, no influence. And trying to do diversity is hard, like anything else. You have to have goals and objectives like anything else that's important. And you have to have people who have the ability to move

the needle. You can't just hang the sign out and says, I believe in diversity and think diversity happens. You know, companies are social systems. Social systems like to recreate themselves. And so if you want to create a diverse workforce because you think is important, then you have to be willing to work at it. And, you know, there's this statement. Have you heard this one about the elephant and the giraffes?

So the giraffes were in a tall, slender building. It was raining outside, like, terribly. And they started feeling sorry for the elephants. And so, you know, they're going to recruit and bring in the elephants into the building because they felt sorry for the elephants. And then after elephants have been in the building for a while, they says, we can't see out of the window. But the windows are too high. And the giraffe says the elephants will grow your neck longer.

All right. And then the elephant says, well, the walls are too tight. Can we widen the building a little bit? So we can fit is lose weight. So I think that what companies often do, they hire black folks or women, et cetera, but they talk and act and do exactly what they've always done, you know, accommodate.

That's why the inclusion part of D&I is really important. And you have to look at who you are and how you do things, and those are those the best things to be doing. You know, a lot of the press about the Valley is, we doing about hiring. But to your point, how do we include, how do we make people feel welcome and stay in cultures? Yeah, well, I think when you set up a job, you set up a profile that you want for the candidate. And people's natural tendency is to profile to themselves, because I know what I'm good at. I value it highly, and I contest for it in an interview. So like, why one eye

profile to me? It's perfect. But if you do that, you're taking a very narrow view of the talent pool because you're seeing it through a very, very specific prism. And so the challenge, the work, I think, starts with broadening your view of what the profile should be beyond yourself. The real benefit of that is gets to the giraffe and the elephant, which is once somebody comes on board with a broader profile than just like the person hiring, then nobody has to question why they're there. Like everybody knows why they're there. They're the very best candidate for that job description because like that's the criteria. I have a belief. I think no matter what we'd say around here in technology, that the average hiring manager is not trying to maximize the

opportunity to trying to minimize risk. That's a great point. Yeah. So if you buy that, then the more different you are, the higher risk I perceive, especially if you are of a person who's really different than me. So if I'm white male and I went to Stanford, then it just feels, well, no better yet. I'm black male and went to Ohio State. So I know they're better than Stanford people, so less risky. Okay.

But you create that at least subconsciously, if not consciously, in your mind. And so that manager subconsciously or that system, that company, creates a higher bar of qualifications. to minimize, to receive risk. And I believe if you don't tease that out, we will all make that mistake. And so I think it's very important as a manager and an executive as a company to make sure that you're first not trying to minimize risk. You're trying to maximize opportunity and that you deal with your own belief system

about what a qualified person looks like. And be willing to broaden that if you believe that diversity of thought and talents and experience creates better outcomes. Colin Powell had a great line on that, which is you hire for the strength, not the lack of weakness. And very few people do that, but it's a huge advantage if you can because that's how you get greatness. You never get greatness if you look for, like, does the person not have any holes? And I'll tell you something about lack of weakness. Everybody's got a weakness. You just didn't see it in the interview.

You want to know what you were getting so you can manage, say, I can manage against that weakness. I can surround that person with the support against that weakness. But if you don't know the weakness of somebody you're trying to hire, that doesn't mean they're perfect. If you don't know what you need to work on, you're not working on it. Yeah. Yeah. You know? So when you think about your point of view on diversity and inclusion, how does that affect the way you coach and mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs?

One of the fascinating things about diversity is if there's a problem, it just shows up more powerfully or quicker to a person who's different or a minority person or a female person. So if you push out on the diversity issues, it'll make you a better company or a better leader. And so I believe that that is to your best interest to challenge yourself as a company, as a leader, as a person. I agree. So I had a manager and he had a woman working for him and he said like, I can't manage her like she hates me. And I said, well, why do you think that? And he said, well, you know, we were having a meeting and I cut her off during the meeting and she came to me afterwards and she said, I really appreciate how you cut me off during the meeting. And I said, well, why do you think she hates you? And he's like, well, it's such a small thing to have a confrontation over it. So I just said, I was like, well, maybe she just didn't like the way you cut her off in the meeting. And I said, so why don't you go talk to her about that and find out? There are these little things that can turn into big things from a diversity standpoint. And, you know, like, people come from different backgrounds.

They're used to different things. I mean, I was a diversity problem when I started working at SGI because, you know, in my family, like the way we used to argue because my father and the way he is, is like, you know, you attack each other, you call him idiots. And you do that in a company setting. You say, well, you're an idiot. People don't like that. Found that out.

By the way, no wonder we get along. So sometimes you have to help somebody adjust into the culture that you have. And just because they come from a different culture doesn't mean they can't make that adjustment. And so I think how you think of it on the individual level, particularly when you're coming up for yourself, should be different than how you think about it. And that's so important because I do think people, you know, lose ground because if you feel defeated before you start, then you are defeated. So some of the companies I work with or have work with, people will say doing diversity is hard. Diversity is hard. And I say, yeah, but we do hard in this business and we're all in.

If you think diversity is hard, try to build a company. Yeah, we do hard. We're about to raise money. I mean, so. I try to deal with the people you raise money broke. So hard. is a terrible reason not to do anything because we live in this world where we choose to do hard every day. Yeah, we do. My last startup, and I was constantly having culture issues with my peers.

And I call him one day, and I'm kind of complaining about this culture and how I don't fit in. And bed said, why don't you just go found your own company and create your own culture? And so, you know, I think that's a third way. I think, you know, entrepreneurship is a powerful vehicle for social change. and my company, you know, we're certainly not perfect, but I do think that's a third option. And I'm glad he challenged me, and I'm glad I did it. I'm going to change my life. So I want to encourage those of you who get stuck, drop out. Found, yeah.

That's a great answer. My question is, when you think about mentors and you want to approach someone with a request to be a mentor, and then you're sort of in a junior role, you guys mentioned that it's important to have a two-way, relationship, you know, like both parties have to get something out of it. And you want to talk to an exec and you're like in the junior role, like, how do you present that? How would you give back to them? One of the things that you, you know, you can start with is if there's somebody who you want to get to know, then you can say, look, especially if they're in the same companies, you can say, look, I really admire you. Would you mind if I bought you lunch and asked you

some questions? And then, you know, you really just want to get started. you don't just go, will you marry me? It's like, who are you? You know, like, what are you talking about? So, you know, start there. And, you know, it really is people like people who know them. And, you know, like how much do you really understand about that person? And do you really like them?

Or are you just doing this, you know, so that you can kind of have a relationship with somebody up in the hierarchy? And those are the kinds of things you need to ask yourself. And try and find a mentor who you really like and would love to just me, that's a great place to start. So I have one thought there, by the way, targeting. So I think anyone who is inclined to mentor has a track record of promoting from within. They have a track record of kind of having mentees.

And it's pretty evident if you think about it, who's inclined to take that lunch meeting and who's not. And so I think I would put that lens on it. And you can't control the chemistry, but you can't control the selection of who joins you for lunch. So I would be deliberate. Many, many people don't value that. and their actions and their own teams that they manage clearly reflect that. So we've talked a lot of tonight about positive experiences with mentorship, but have any of you ever had any experiences with mentor-mente relationships that haven't worked out?

And at what point do you make the decision to step away? Well, it can be really self-challenging and frustrating to see somebody headed for a train wreck that you've seen 10 times before. Does he talk about me going to work at MedLabs? And the person just won't listen. And at some point, I've had to say, it's just not worth my time because a person knows it all, you know, and they don't care to hear, you know, they have all the answers to everything. And I just, I don't want to waste my time or your time. So if I have no value proposition, I don't know why we should be discussing it.

So I've had that happen several times in my career. Yeah, for me, the biggest thing is when they don't tell me the truth on purpose. You know, it's not that they don't know, they know, and they don't want me to know. And so I'm just like, why am I here? Under no circumstances, do I want to work with somebody who doesn't tell me the truth, like, consistently? What a marvelous evening. Thank you guys very much for coming.