Ben used to have a saying when discussing roles and responsibilities in a company, it went like the following:
"Nobody is more important than any other person, but some people are more important to the business. To your children, you are the most important person in the world, and I don't matter whatsoever to them."
He used it in the context of making it clear that some people would need to carry greater responsibilities, and would be held to a higher standard, and be remunerated differently - but everyone in the company deserved a high level of respect.
And, let's be clear - Ben is _also_ the person who suggests that it's _easier_ to teach a founder to be a CEO, then to take an outsider and have them successfully run a business. It would suggest that he believes that the true challenge is finding great Founders, not turning them into CEOs.
While I think several of the responses to petervandijck are on target WRT Horowitz, Peter nails two major HN dysfunctions in one short post:
- executive hero-worship
- living in a fantasy world where parenting is not a fundamental activity in society
Part of what I like about Horowotz's essay is how his elucidation of becoming a CEO (which I have no experienced) echo my experience of becoming a parent.
BTW, the gender stuff is NOT elidable. If y'all weren't mostly men, y'all would take women's work much more seriously, and be much more skeptical about the way heroic CEOs fail to acknowledge the woman who is caring for their kids in the typical narratives of their awesome business accomplishments.
"Nobody is more important than any other person, but some people are more important to the business. To your children, you are the most important person in the world, and I don't matter whatsoever to them."
He used it in the context of making it clear that some people would need to carry greater responsibilities, and would be held to a higher standard, and be remunerated differently - but everyone in the company deserved a high level of respect.
And, let's be clear - Ben is _also_ the person who suggests that it's _easier_ to teach a founder to be a CEO, then to take an outsider and have them successfully run a business. It would suggest that he believes that the true challenge is finding great Founders, not turning them into CEOs.