Book Review – The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz


Yesterday night, I finally managed to read Ben Horowitz’s book . If you have not read this book – you should do so http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building-ebook/dp/B00DQ845EA/ref=sr_1_1 . It is brilliant. Barring a few places where I don’t share Mr Horowitz’s  views – I was nodding my head throughout , often with a smile or a sigh.

It is a jargon free book – which in itself is quite an accomplishment for a business book. This is a book for senior level management practitioners – although I am sure some MBA students will find it interesting too.

I have never been a CEO in my life – but I have worked closely with quite a few at my present and past employers and also at my clients. I did not quite realize what a lonely job it really is till I read the book. While the success of a CEO is defined by the team, the CEO has to make the hard decisions as an individual for the most part. If everyone starting out to be a CEO truly appreciated the loneliness of the job, I wonder how many will have CEO ambitions to begin with.

The key theme of the book is that there is no real recipe to success as a CEO, at least in a tech startup scene. Honest to god, if the book went into some “6 steps to be a great CEO” type explanation, I would have stopped reading it that instant. Horowitz comes across as credible to me instantly by saying there is no such recipe.

About 20% of Horowitz’s advice is original – I especially liked the good/bad product manager memo and differences between the working of a peacetime CEO and a wartime CEO. The rest is conventional wisdom that you can get elsewhere too. I usually tune out when I read oft repeated stuff – but this time I did not. And it is for a very simple reason – the book is written without the “6 steps” format. It has more of a “stream of consciousness” approach with many real life stories. It felt more natural. It might also be because my own blogging style is largely unstructured .

The book is definitely attractive for execs in a tech startup – CEOs probably will find the most value, but also general managers and people looking to move into the startup scene at a senior level. I am not sure if this book will offer as much value to non-tech company leaders, or those without heavy VC type financing. Not every CEO has the sheer will power or connections it takes to get a $29M company to an exit of $1.65B. So the specific applicability of the book to the larger entrepreneur ecosystem is a bit of an unknown to me.

Now to the four things where I think the book could have done a bit better

1. Right from the start, I noticed that Ben used “she” to describe the leaders . I immediately perked up thinking that here is finally a leader who has seen the value in having woman leaders developed in his company. However, I was quite disillusioned by the end of the book. He hardly has an example of an actual woman leader in the book . None of the people he called out as mentors are women. None of the people he called as his stellar executives are women (except one exception I think – Margit Wennmachers) . Even the fictitious names in examples he used were not women. It just looked as an explicit effort to come across as politically correct – which is awkward given the nature of the book which is anything but PC.

2. Ben points out correctly that there are challenges in getting a large company executive to function well in a startup. However he generalizes it to an extent where it comes across almost as if all big company execs fit a certain mould. I fully agree with the challenges he brings up – it is true that there are many big company execs who will fit the picture Ben paints . There are also plenty of big company execs who do well in startups. I would have also been interested in Ben’s views on founders who sell out to large companies but then don’t find success being part of the large company set up.

3. While I like the part of taking the hard decisions on hiring and firing employees and executives in an objective way , I was surprised that the cascading effect on their teams was not called out. Top sales teams are built on extreme loyalty – reps follow great sales managers across companies. If you hire a great sales VP, you also get a bunch of good reps in the bargain. If you fire a VP of sales, then you should also expect an attrition of reps. Same thing with engineers – developers like to work with smart developers. So if you lose your star developer – especially one that is looked up on by ecosystem as a super hero – it affects your ability to hire great ones.

4. Both the IPO and the sale to HP seem to have been done with the help of a genius VP of business development, John O’Farrell . However the book does not give any insight into finding a great VP for BD, or building a world class BD team.

I am hoping that in his next book, Mr Horowitz will go into some detail on all these topics and many others that did not fit into this book.

All said – it was an enjoyable read and I do recommend the book highly. In fact I am thinking of ordering a few copies as Xmas gifts to a few friends.

Security in India urgently needs transformation


Over the last week, I have spent my time traveling across India with my team visiting MongoDB partners . It is amazing to see how much SI industry has changed , and also how much has not changed . More on that in another blog post at another time .

The one thing that consistently was a pain in the neck for me was the security process at companies , hotels and airports . It is the most cumbersome , inefficient and ineffective process one could design .

Let’s start with hotels . Hotels in India take security seriously from the looks of it – and after the terrorist attack on Taj in Mumbai , it is understandable that they stepped up the effort . However the mechanics of the exercise is where it is borderline stupid . When a car carrying a passenger arrives at the gate , they search in the trunk of the car and under the car – but not inside the car . What happens if a bad guy is holding a weapon in his hand while sitting inside the car ? Nothing – he will make his way to the hotel .

In some hotels they have sniffer dogs checking for explosives . It is clear to me at least that these dogs are over worked and most probably have no drive to find anything half way through a long shift . I do appreciate the opportunity to pet those dogs on my way in whenever I can .

Then there is a metal detector when you get into the hotel lobby itself . I watched multiple people walk through it with their wallets and phones in their pockets and the thing never beeped once . What exactly is the point here ?

Moving on to large enterprises – many of them huge multinational companies . They have armies of security personnel and access to technology . Yet the process to admit a visitor is nearly 100% manual and ineffective . They write visitor info in thick ledgers – often multiple ones which clearly can’t be fully reconciled easily or at real time if there is a breach . These companies one way or other are at the forefront of “digital transformation” , “big data” and “internet of things” movement today – and hence they should have no problems fixing it . I suspect there are legal issues that are beyond their control that is stopping them . I really hope that this issue is taken care of swiftly – it will not only improve security , it will also tangibly improve customer satisfaction . What is more – if they can design an elegant solution, they might even be able to sell it to others for a profit .

And finally there are airports . Honestly Indian airports seem to have the best security of all places I have been to . The only sore sight here is the sheer number of people needed for a single task . Just to board a small regional jet in Bangalore , I counted more than twenty young people at the gate with walkie talkies and multiple printed documents . That is roughly the job of three people elsewhere . It is not an IT problem – it’s a management problem . Fix it please

That apart , everything else has been fine and dandy in India so far .

MongoDB global consulting services – lets get started


Yesterday , I took on the responsibility of leading the charge for MongoDB’s consulting services , in addition to my role as the leader of global channels and BD . As I broke the news to my friends and family, the most common response was “we knew you would be back in consulting sooner than later” 🙂

I grew up in consulting – from TCS in late 90s till IBM GBS a few years ago . I have seen the good and bad of consulting and I left it for a technology job mostly because I thought there wasn’t a lot more value I could add as a consulting guy after all those years . The travel schedule for consultants is kind of brutal too – and that played a role in my decision too .

So what changed my mind to jump back into consulting with both feet in ?

Services business for me has exactly one KPI – outrageous success for our clients . Services is not a transactional business for me . We aim to be trusted advisors and partners for our clients . And that is essentially what I mean when I say “we don’t have customers – we have clients”.

Here is the short answer – MongoDB in 2014 gives me the same energy to jump on a plane at 4AM every week , that I used to have as an SAP consultant in late 90s. It checks every box for me of what an interesting and challenging leadership job should be .

And here is the much longer answer 🙂

1. My Gang

Our consulting team has some of the the smartest people one can work with . My daughter has a favorite short that says “I got mad ninja skills and stuff” . As I learned more about my new team – and as I spent time talking to Richard K, my consulting director – the visual I had in mind was standing in between a lot of people wearing a similar Tshirt 🙂 .

I would love to work with them and see them grow to great heights as we make our clients transform their apps to a modern paradigm .

Yes I am hiring – if you are an expert in building apps on MongoDB and/or operating database clusters in complex landscapes , and love to work closely with clients – we should talk . Leave a comment below with your linkedin profile and I will be in touch if there is a match .

2. The Client

Vast majority of apps that enterprises use today run on legacy RDBMS technologies . It is not because those legacy technologies are the best suited for those apps – mostly it is because there was limited choice at the time these apps were built . Policies and procedures that exist in IT shops were formulated to suit the needs and cover the deficiencies of these old technologies .

Many clients pay a lot for that choice today . They pay a hefty maintenance bill every year . They are stuck with apps that can’t change fast enough because of rigid relational schemas .

I believe we can show customers a better path to success . At least 70% of apps can work better on a newer database like MongoDB – with way more agility and much less cost . My team can do that assessment quickly and we can partner with customers to do the redesign of those old applications and creation of those new modern applications that will grow with your changing business needs .

If you are a company with such applications – and would like us to take a look at modernizing your applications – we should talk . Shoot me a note to vijay at mongoDB dot com .

I should make myself very clear here – I don’t hate SQL at all . I am as big a fan as the next person and have spent a lot of time developing on relational databases . If you want to run SAP ERP – by all means use a relational DB. It is optimized for that workload .

I won’t ever tell a customer to rip and replace a legacy technology unless there is a tangible outcome . I would also be the first to tell them if SQL is the better way to go for their given use case . Old relational technologies also have more tooling built for their stuff – and I expect customers to have some inertia in moving away from what is familiar to them .

3. The product

MongoDB is no doubt a hugely popular technology – a database that gets downloaded tens of thousands of times a day . I don’t need to convince clients to use it – they already love it . I believe that most of what my Gang needs to do is to show them the “art of the possible” on development , operations etc .

It is also a technology that is rapidly advancing . Who better to help our customers and partners with these innovations than our services experts ?

4. Our partners

We have more than 700 partners today – and my channels Gang and I are committed to their success in helping our customers successfully transform . Every partner I have spoken to so far have assured me of their full support in working closely with our services team on customer engagements . They are seeing the customer pain daily of working with legacy database technologies . Together we can partner with customers to build applications that suit the needs of today and tomorrow .

MongoDB also has a great ISV program . We want to be a great database for building modern applications . Anything that is not core to our database – we partner heavily . We work with a spectrum of enterprise vendors like IBM and SAP to tiny startups who have great products that interoperate with MongoDB .

We codevelop solutions and we go to market together . For example – our hadoop connector is certified on Cloudera , Hortonworks and MapR . If there is a heavy analytics workload that needs to be triggered – we offload it to hadoop (or a Datawarehouse like teradata ) rather than try to do it inside our database .

Another example is Adobe Experience Manager which uses MongoDB as a database option . We work with Adobe and our SI partners to help mutual customers succeed . This commitment to interoperability is crucial to customer success and something that our consultants hold dear to their hearts .

That is it – can you tell I am excited ? 🙂