Despite the best intentions, companies often become culturally dysfunctional. This occurs when leadership has a perception about the culture that conflicts with reality, or leadership behaves differently than what might be written down.
If you look back over the history of computing, it started as mainframes or terminals. As PCs or work stations became prevalent, computing moved to the edge, and we had applications that took advantage of edge computing and the CPU and processing power at the edge. Cloud computing brought things back to the center.
I have really become a huge believer in the power of open source.
It doesn't matter what's written on a coffee mug or on a 'culture' slide; what you do as a CEO, day in and day out, and how you behave will define your company's culture.
There has been an ebb and flow in enterprise IT of centralized versus distributed.
When you and I go to work, and we use a computer to work and find that our work apps are completely onerous and the apps we use at home are quite easy, we wonder, why can't it be simpler, easier, quicker, and less expensive?
Old companies that had nothing to do with software in the past all have software development activities to unlock the invention that's occurring inside of these organizations. And so the developer is a very important part of that overall ecosystem.
I can certainly imagine a day where task workers, enterprise workers no longer communicate via email but instead use some social vehicle that looks a lot like consumer social networks we see today.
When you are only one vendor, there is a very low rate of innovation. You think the old architecture is just fine, and it can just happily exist for many years.
A self-driving car will have 200-plus CPUs. That's a data center on wheels.
I look at Boston-based companies all the time... There's certainly great companies in Boston. If the deal makes sense on the merit of the deal itself, we'll go and do the deal.
When I was a developer, I couldn't buy a pencil. I had no budget, nothing.
I think with the proliferation of mobile devices and then, eventually, the Internet of Things, we literally have supercomputers in our pockets and supercomputers that will hang on telephone poles and in light bulbs.
If you believe that the mobile phone is the next supercomputer, which I do, you can imagine a datacenter that is modeled after, literally, hundreds or thousands or millions of mobile phones. They won't have screens on them, but there'll be millions of lightweight mobile-phone processors in the datacenter.
Technical co-founders are great at envisioning where the company's going from a strategic standpoint. They have what I call the 'gut-feel' of building out their business.
It's easier to coach a technical founder how to be CEO and manage a business than it is to teach a professional CEO the nuances of that particular business.
With the premise that we look for technical co-founders to run a company, I view myself as being a coach to that technical co-founder. I can help them with their business issues, with the growth issues of taking a company from a very early stage to something much larger.
Probably, if I created a venture fund, I would create a firm with virtual services not too different from the a16z model, but without employing people. So I would get CPOs, engineering talent, marketing people who wanted to be involved with the venture fund and provide services.
As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.
The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open communication, and the organization inherits a culture of open communication.
