The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment

Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape, writes a post that dissects Charlie Munger's speech "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." Andreessen applies Munger's principles to entrepreneurship and starting a company. In the passage below, he discusses the role that incentives play:

The design of tactical incentives -- e.g. bonuses -- is a whole topic in and of itself, and is critically important as your company grows. The most significant thing to keep in mind is that how the goals are designed really matters -- as Mr. Munger says, people tend to game any system you put in place, and then they tend to rationalize that gaming until they believe they really are doing the right thing.

I think it was Andy Grove who said that for every goal you put in front of someone, you should also put in place a counter-goal to restrict gaming of the first goal.

So, for example, if you are incenting your recruiters on the number of new employees recruited and hired, you need to also give them a counter-goal (and tie it to their compensation) that measures the quality of the new hires three months in. Otherwise the recruiters are guaranteed to give you what you don't want: a lot of mediocre new hires.

One of the great unwritten Silicon Valley skewed incentive stories was a major datacenter vendor in the late 90's that incented its salespeople based on bookings of long-term datacenter leases, without sufficient counter-goals tied to revenue collection or the customer's ability to pay. Sure enough, soon the company's reported bookings were heading straight up, revenue was flat, and cash headed straight down, resulting in a truly spectacular bankruptcy. The salespeople got paid, though, so they were happy.

More recently, skewed incentives in the mortgage industry -- mortage issuers getting paid based on quantity of mortgages issued, versus ability to pay -- caused many of the current catastrophic Wall Street financial meltdowns you get to read about every day.

Even engineers need counter-goals: incent engineers based purely on a ship date, and you'll get a shipping product with lots of bugs. Incent based on number of bugs fixed, and you'll never get any new features. And so on.

Especially in smaller companies, peer pressure can be a very effective form of incentive. This is greatly enabled and abetted by transparency. People hate to be embarrassed in front of their peer group, so if it's crystal clear who's performing well and who isn't, poor performers will be highly motivated to improve -- and if they're not, that's good to know, since obviously then you really need to fire them.

Read the full post here