How Mark Zuckerberg became a wartime CEO

In April 2011, Ben Horowitz wrote a popular blog post about war and business. There are two kinds of CEOs, said the entrepreneur and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz. There’s the “peacetime” CEO, best represented by Eric Schmidt during Google’s charmed first decade. And then there’s the “wartime” CEO — the one facing an existential threat. Incoming Google CEO Larry Page, he argued, was a wartime CEO — with Facebook ascendant, Page would have to adopt a more combative mindset. Horowitz writes: In peacetime, leaders must maximize and broaden the current opportunity. As a result, peacetime leaders employ techniques to encourage broad-based creativity and contribution across a diverse set of possible objectives. In wartime, by contrast, the... Continue reading…