Ben Horowitz. Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. One of the most respected investors in tech. Backed Facebook, Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, Slack. Built and sold Opsware for $1.6 billion before that. His take on what makes startups work at the earliest stage has nothing to do with the idea. It is about the team. Two people. Two different strengths. One is the inventor. Their job is to build a product that is ten times better than anything else available. Not a little better. Ten times. The other is the entrepreneur. Their job is to take the market. Distribution, sales, partnerships, positioning. Getting the product into people's hands. The best founding teams have both people capable of doing both. But at minimum you need someone world class at each. Most solo founders are trying to play both roles. And one always suffers. Either spending all the time building and nobody knows the product exists. Or spending all the time selling something that is not good enough yet. That tension is why the founders we work with come to us. They are usually the entrepreneur. They understand the market. They have the customers. They have the plan. What they need is a world class product and engineering team. We fill that role. Not as an agency. As the technical side of the founding team. If you are the entrepreneur half and need the inventor half, let's talk. #benhorowitz #a16z #andreessenhorowitz #foundingteam #cofounder #startupadvice #techfounder #startupfounder #productstudio #buildinpublic #softwarestudio #entrepreneurship #mvpdevelopment #productdevelopment #technicalcofounder #startup #buildwithus #startuplife #foundermindset #companybuilding - @kanopy.labs