PandoMonthly - June 2012 - Sarah Lacy intervie...

PandoMonthly – June 2012 – Sarah Lacy interviews Ben Horowitz (Photo credit: thekenyeung)

Instead of writing about what it means to be a Leader, I am just going to link to a bunch of posts that I read about the challenges of being a CEO. The classic one is “The Struggle” by Ben Horowitz, and I found a number of gems in this category in his blog. If you have not read my post about the Struggle, you should. When your startup goes through a metamorphosis of growing up there is always growing pains, there is politics and the team culture challenges. Building a world class team is hard, if this was easy or simple everyone would do it. I have been really digging deep into figuring out what makes teams tick and come together. I guess it is as different as we are as people.

  1. What is the most difficult CEO skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
  2. How to minimize politics in your company?
  3. Making yourself a CEO
  4. Lead Bullets
  5. Peace time CEO/War time CEO

All this being said, what a CEO will be measured on is quite simple actually:

Let’s not bullshit each other —- the most important characteristic of any CEO is to be a moneymaker. It is not particularly dignified to say it that bluntly but you can sugar coat whatever you want and it all comes down to “can you ring the bell?

—  The mighty comment blogger JLM in a comment to this post: A VC: What A CEO Does