David Ulevitch, a prominent figure in the tech industry, has left an indelible mark as the founder of OpenDNS and EveryDNS, and now as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. His journey from a young entrepreneur to a seasoned investor has been filled with valuable lessons on building companies, navigating the complexities of the cybersecurity landscape, and fostering innovation.

On Entrepreneurship and Building a Company

  1. On the dual nature of entrepreneurship: "Entrepreneurship is about two things: understanding how the world works and understanding how people work. Ideas that address both tend to have the best outcomes." [1]
  2. On the reality of starting a company: "Maybe it's whiner's fatigue, but I'm getting tired of hearing about how hard it is to start a company and be a CEO. It's not that hard." [2][3]
  3. On the challenges of success: "Running a successful, growing company in Silicon Valley can create an ironic sort of depression and delusion. The better you're doing, the higher the stakes, and higher expectations for you to win. Maybe that's why people say it's so hard. But that doesn't make it hard. That just makes it distracting." [2][4]
  4. On the true satisfaction of building: "When people ask me, 'Are you happy?' I respond with, 'You've asked the wrong question.' There is a deep kind of satisfaction you get from building a company. This kind of satisfaction transcends happy, sad, hard, or easy. I seek satisfaction. I want to be positively disruptive." [5]
  5. On the founder's journey: As a founder, you're generally at different stages of the company-building journey. Sometimes you're a technical CEO, trying to build a product, to make sure it actually is feasible; then you are constantly in the market with customers, doing customer discovery, making sure that you are solving the problems you're trying to solve. [6]
  6. On the evolution of a founder's role: You end up becoming sort of a product CEO, making sure that you have product-market fit; then you end up becoming a sales CEO, on the enterprise side, where you're trying to generate revenue and figure out how you can go acquire more customers. And then if that works out, you become this really general sort of manager or go-to-market CEO, and you're thinking about how do you scale and accelerate a business. [6]
  7. On the importance of execution: "There are lots of great ideas. What sets great companies apart is their ability to execute."
  8. On dealing with underperforming employees: "Bad employees are like a cancer. Once you get rid of people who are a bad fit, everybody else bounces up 20 feet. Once you give up helping someone improve, it's over. They won't magically get better."
  9. On team ownership: "Make your team feel like they have ownership and are invested in the success of the company. If you can do that successfully all of the decisions they make will be in the best interest of the company."
  10. On the motivation of an entrepreneur: "Entrepreneurs are always skeptical of the status quo. Whether in school, inside a large company or starting their own venture, entrepreneurs are never satisfied—they are always looking for ways to do things better, safer, faster, cheaper. In that way, I've always been an entrepreneur."
  11. On the difference between a dreamer and an entrepreneur: "A dreamer just keeps it in their heads; an entrepreneur makes it happen."
  12. On hiring for the present: "People often think about the executives they're hiring and is this person going to do anything for four years, or five years, or six years; I think that's not always the right question to ask. You have to think about what is the right team I need for the right time." [6]
  13. On the difficulty of building a team: "Building a successful team is one of the most important and most difficult things you can do as a founder. There are a lot of people who are capable or smart but they may not be great inside your company."
  14. On near-death experiences for companies: "Building a big business is a long journey, and inevitably there are some serious low periods mixed in with the highs...But often these near-death experiences make you stronger." [7]
  15. On the power of focus: "Time is always the most valuable currency in an individual's life, in a company's life. Aligning all that time behind the most important — putting more wood behind fewer arrows — is much more important." [8]

On Cybersecurity

  1. On the nature of cyber threats: "The way that worms and viruses spread on the Internet is not that different from the way they spread in the real world, and the way you quarantine them is not that different, either." [2][9]
  2. On the importance of DNS in security: "DNS is kind of the hamster under the hood that drives the Internet." [2][5]
  3. On the future of security: "The future of security is going to be cloud delivered... The future of security is going to be based on analyzing data." [10]
  4. On the necessity of proactive security: "Security has to be baked in, it can't be bolted on later. You have to have a mindset of security." [11]
  5. On the simplicity of good security practices: "Security is not that hard. It doesn't add extra time, it's just about doing things right the first time around." [11]
  6. On the most effective cyber threat: "It's still one of the oldest threats, and it still remains one of the most effective, which is social engineering." [11]
  7. On the goal of security: "The goal in security is how do you eliminate the noise and focus on what really matters." [11]
  8. On the changing security landscape: "You can't just stick a firewall at the edge of your corporate network anymore and hope that you're you're safe." [12]
  9. On the role of everyone in security: "Everyone's a security practitioner when it comes to the IT and operations side of the house." [12]
  10. On the talent gap in cybersecurity: "The unemployment rate for qualified security people is zero or it's negative." [12]
  11. On the parallels between cybersecurity and public health: When there's outbreaks and you want to quarantine populations, you want to inoculate people, you want to vaccinate people, the same thing is true in cyber security. [13]
  12. On the Internet of Things and security: "The internet of things is is actually a a great reason why people need to adopt something like a cloud delivered security solution... you're going to have to do network-based security. You can't rely on these endpoints." [12]

On Technology and the Future

  1. On the importance of diversity on the internet: "I think anything which promotes heterogeneity on the Internet promotes stability. Diversity in services, service providers, and separating the layers of the networking stack are all important." [2][9]
  2. On the developer mindset: "The developer's way for me is all about efficiency and it's about creative expression. It's about focusing those limited mental calories that you have in a given day and spending on the highest and best uses of your time." [6]
  3. On the laziness of developers as a feature: "I will say that I think developers are unfailingly the laziest people I know and I say that as a compliment. Anytime they have to do work that has to be done over and over again... they're gonna find a way to automate it." [14]
  4. On the future of work: "We are entering an era in which we will all work like developers. And this has big implications for both who buys software and how we build it." [6]
  5. On the power of technology: "I'm not necessarily in love with technology, I'm in love with the potential of technology... I love the internet because it has no borders. It's a great connector. It's a great disintermediator." [13]
  6. On the value of an anthropology degree in tech: "I often joke that it has turned out to be way more useful than I expected, and it's really true. Studying human behavior, different cultures and differences across communities has given me a broad worldview and made me more open-minded and curious. Technology interacts with people." [1]
  7. On building for diverse users: "We can't throw the same technology solution at everyone; we need to appreciate differences and think more broadly about how we solve problems." [1]
  8. On the importance of user experience: "We've always tried to put user experience first, even when that gets in the way of making more money." [15]

On Sales and Go-to-Market

  1. On pivoting from consumer to enterprise: "It's a massive transition. You've got to change the whole culture of the company, the whole team." [10]
  2. On the importance of listening to customers: "You really have to get comfortable with building a product that is listening to customers, customer-focused. We can talk about that, but it is a journey." [10]
  3. On pricing: "We've raised our prices four times in the last two years roughly 30 percent each time... on average every deal was selling at negative 20 percent discount. Every deal was selling at 20 percent over list." [10]
  4. On the value of getting in front of customers: "You always have to be in front of customers, whoever your constituents are." [10]
  5. On earning the right to be complicated: "There are lots of things in the enterprise that actually need to be complicated. And so I think that there's a way to frame that not everything needs to be simple, some things need to be complicated. You have to earn the right to be complicated." [16]
  6. On the importance of time to value: "We are living in a world where people want very short time to value." [16]
  7. On finding early buyers: "You need to have a way to get a hook into earlier buyers that are lower down in an org." [16]
  8. On the value of PR for enterprise sales: "PR is just like, you know, like air cover to build awareness about your company. It's not about explaining maybe exactly what you do, just so that people can be like, 'Oh yeah, I've heard of that company.'" [16]
  9. On targeting customers: "It's okay for a company in the early stages not to know exactly who they want to go after, but they do have to understand the consequences of the customers that they're targeting." [8]

On Personal Philosophy and Life

  1. On what keeps him up at night: "There's only one thing that regularly keeps me up at night. Working with the greatest people in the world and knowing that they are counting on me to build a company that endures - a company where they can grow professionally. A company where they can build world-class products and be proud to work." [5]
  2. On self-motivation: "I put more pressure on myself than anyone else can." [5]
  3. On his definition of success: "People often ask whether I consider myself successful. I don't yet, because there's so much more I want to accomplish." [5]
  4. On his early career: "I grew up in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. I got my first job the summer after eighth grade at a small Internet service provider." [2][9]
  5. On his leadership style: "Occasionally, I make waffles for breakfast for any employee who wants to talk to me. I make them around 8 A.M. as an incentive for people to show up early." [2][5]
  6. On his personal principles (from John Perry Barlow's "25 Principles of Adult Behavior" which he features on his personal website): "Be patient. No matter what. Don't badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn't say to him... Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that." [17]

Learn more:

  1. Manifest Space: American Dynamism with Andreessen Horowitz's David Ulevitch 2/1/24
  2. Current time information in San Jose, CA, US.
  3. David Ulevitch Quotes - BrainyQuote
  4. David Ulevitch - Wikipedia
  5. An enterprising advocate - The Source - WashU
  6. From Technical to Product to Sales CEO: Hard-Earned Lessons Learned | Andreessen Horowitz
  7. David Ulevitch Quote: “Maybe it's whiner's fatigue, but I'm getting tired of hearing about how hard it is to start a company and be a CEO....” - QuoteFancy
  8. a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO
  9. David Ulevitch, Author at Andreessen Horowitz
  10. Manifest Space: American Dynamism with Andreessen Horowitz's David Ulevitch 2/1/24
  11. Sitemap | SaaStr
  12. The Entrepreneur Questionnaire: David Ulevitch, Founder and CEO, OpenDNS - Medium
  13. David Ulevitch, Author at Future
  14. We Don't All Need to Learn to Code - YouTube
  15. Podcast: David Ulevitch and the OpenDNS Security Story - SecurityWeek
  16. Jan 2019 NYETM - Fireside chat w/ David Ulevitch (Andreessen Horowitz) & Jonathan Lehr (Work-Bench) - YouTube
  17. David.Ulevitch.Com - Homepage