1. Hire Different!
by John O'Farrell
Mark now runs the Market Development function for Andreessen Horowitz.
Every aspiring CEO has heard of David Ogilvy’s famous admonition, usually paraphrased as “Hire
people smarter than yourself” or words to that effect. In my case, following that good advice has not
been hard. Applying that criterion has meant that I’ve had an enormous pool of qualified candidates
to choose from. As I’ve progressed in my career, however, I’ve come to believe in the importance of
another, less discussed principle as the company grows: Hire people who are different from you,
and who will have the courage to challenge you when it matters.
Time to step up: Hiring the VP of Sales
For the technology founder-led companies we love to back at Andreessen Horowitz, recognizing the
need to “hire different” is particularly important when the company is transitioning from initial product
development mode into sales mode. If you’re an a16z founder, you’re very likely an engineer or
computer scientist. Virtually all of your early hires will have been engineers or developers. While
you’ve hopefully hired people who are smarter than you, they may not be that different from you.
Now you’ve got a product, it’s time to hire a VP of Sales. Prepare to hire different—very different!
A typical sales culture is different from a typical engineering culture in almost every aspect—from
personality types to values to dress code to working hours. Introducing sales DNA is highly likely to
clash with your engineering culture. That prospect will feel quite uncomfortable, but is absolutely
critical if you’re serious about building a real company.
While on an intellectual level you may recognize the need to hire an executive who’s different, it can
be really hard to act on it in practice. Most of us are naturally more comfortable with people who are
like us. If as a first-time tech founder CEO you feel entirely comfortable with that VP of Sales
candidate, she’s probably not the right one. The right candidate will feel risky to you from the
cultural fit point of view. So, you’ll want to know what the team thinks. However, the interview
feedback from the team is likely to make you even more uncomfortable. Here are some real
examples of technical team feedback from interviews of highly qualified sales candidates:
“I'm worried that he’s rough around the edges and would clash with our people.”
“His tone was very A-type salesman.”
“I fear for the culture if she were to come aboard.”

2. “He had very limited understanding of our product.”
“I don’t think he has much idea of what we do and how we do it.”
“I think he could generate massive revenue, but he’d destroy the culture by building a Salesforce-
type sales organization.”
So, hiring the right sales leader will involve not just overruling your own emotions, but rejecting the
strongly held opinions of several members of your team. Remember you’re not recruiting her for her
knowledge of the company, but for her knowledge of the outside world. As my partner Ben puts it:
“Generally, you want product leaders with superior internal knowledge (knowledge of the code base,
knowledge of the culture, knowledge of the people). With sales people, it's the opposite—they need
to have external knowledge (knowledge of customers, purchasing processes, customer org
structures, customer cultures, . . .)”.
Two-way street
While you and the team are trying to evaluate this unfamiliar animal and assess whether you can
handle it in your habitat, don’t forget she’s evaluating you too. Just as you’re asking yourselves
things like, “Will this person destroy our culture?”, she’s asking herself, “Are these guys serious
about building a business, and will I get the support I need to build a winning sales organization?
Will this CEO have my back with the company and the board?” She won’t need everyone’s buy-in
day one—a good VP of sales will earn that over time—but she will need full and sustained support
from you and the board to put in place the processes, people and sales culture that can transform a
great product organization into a great business. This is your time to lead. The way you handle the
recruiting process will speak volumes about whether you’re the leader she wants to bet her career
on.
Hiring different at Opsware
At Loudcloud/Opsware, we went though three VPs of sales in the first four years of the company.
Each one of them was well liked and an excellent fit with the culture, but not one of them was able to
consistently hit our quarterly sales targets. By 2003, looking for our fourth sales leader in as many
years, we met a guy named Mark Cranney[1]. He seemed very well qualified, and he gave us
several pages of references to call if we wanted proof. However, virtually everyone who interviewed
him had similar feedback: “He might be a great sales guy, but there’s no way he’d fit here. Way too
risky.”

3. Ben Horowitz and I called every one of his references. They confirmed that Mark was an
exceptional sales leader who had consistently achieved great results. But could we take the risk of
introducing such a culturally different executive into Opsware’s strong culture? Only Ben and I
seemed to think so. We hired him.
Hiring Mark, and the many sales professionals he added to our ranks, was indeed a shock to the
system. It created significant tension in the company at times, as sales culture met engineering
culture. It was a tension that we badly needed—a healthy tension between the demanding outside
world of customer needs and competitive pressures and our sheltered inside world of PRDs and
predictable development schedules. Mark was unreasonable—he told it like it was, not how we
wanted it to be. It stretched every part of the company, from engineering to marketing to legal to
finance. Gradually, we became a more customer-driven organization and we started making our
numbers. Over time, cultural discomfort shifted to mutual respect and even to affection. In the years
that followed, we won hundreds of the world’s most demanding enterprise IT accounts, met their
needs with market-leading products, outpaced a brutally tough competitor, and grew bookings and
revenues at a rapid pace. For Opsware, hiring different was the key to unlocking the company’s true
potential.
The courage to challenge
Strong leaders don’t just hire people who are smarter than them, or different from them. They also
look for people who have the courage to challenge them, and they create a culture that encourages
people to do so. Ironically, being surrounded by lots of smart people makes it harder to speak up,
particularly for more junior team members. “If all of these smart people think X makes sense, who
am I to challenge them?” The more senior you are, the less likely you are to be challenged, and the
more you will have to work to encourage it. “She’s the CEO—she must know what she’s doing. I’m
not going to question it.” I don’t know about you, but if I were the emperor, I’d want someone to tell
me before I walked down the street naked. Like the emperor, you won’t hear diverse opinions if you
don’t actively solicit them—and resist the temptation to slaughter them with your ferocious intellect
the minute they’re expressed!
At Andreessen Horowitz, we’re fortunate to have a lot of very smart people, more senior and more
junior, around the table when we talk about companies we’ve just met. It takes real courage to
speak up when everyone else seems to love (or hate) some opportunity we’ve just seen, but we
particularly want to hear that different view. We work hard to encourage people to speak up. The
best investments are often controversial, and vigorous debate leads to better investment decisions.
The same applies to business decisions. As CEO, it’s your job to make the call. Having people
around the table with the background and the courage to be controversial makes it more likely you’ll

4. make the right one. As your company grows, recognize that you’ll need to hire different, and strive
to build a culture that encourages and rewards constructive challenge and diversity of opinion.