Venture Capital Investor Uses Rap In Business | The Well Versed

Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz is making headlines for an unlikely reason. A trip to the company website links directly to the business blogs of its employees and founders; among them co-founder Ben Horowitz, and smack dab at the beginning of each of his entries are lyrics ? often rap lyrics at that. But why?

Horowitz; who told?the?New York Times ?he was introduced to rap music during his stint as one of the only Caucasian players on the Berkely High School football team, is using lyrics to teach valuable business lessons.

?All the management books are like, ?This is how you set objectives, this is how you set up an org chart,? but that?s all the easy part of management,? Horowitz told The Times? Claire Cain Miller.??The hard part is how you feel. Rap helps me connect emotionally.?

And so he connects firing employees to Dr. Dre?s ?The Watcher,? executives standing up to Board Members with The Game?s ?Scream On Em,? ?and the benefits of founding execs running a company to Rakim?s ?Follow The Leader.?

?Because it?s Rakim, and he?s like the greatest rapper of all time, he could fit into two sentences what it took me three pages to explain,? he said according to the New York Times.

So what can we take from Horowitz?s example? For one, it?s another affirmation that hip hop is?universal. ?It brought Horowitz in front of the Congressional Black Caucus last year to lecture about cross-cultural connections on?the?Internet.?Jason Lee,?the son of a Caucus member and frequent visitor to Horowitz?s blog, attests to the fact that its bridging cultural gaps between the ?bubble? of?Silicon?Valley and the rest of the world.

?The fact that he begins with a relevant hip hop lyric immediately contextualizes the narrative into something familiar and accessible to people from a wide variety of experiences,? Lee told the New York Times. ?To the extent that more people read his blog, relate to his posts and can place themselves in the situations he describes, I think more people will feel like Silicon Valley has room for them as well.?

Source: http://thewellversed.com/2012/02/21/venture-capital-investor-uses-rap-in-business/

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