“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy... In good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing.”
The Story Is the Strategy
A composite from two Horowitz sources. The first sentence (“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.”) is verbatim from The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (HarperBusiness, 2014), in the section “The strategy and the story.” The second (“In good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing.”) is verbatim from Horowitz’s earlier essay “How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs” (a16z, May 31, 2010), which the book chapter adapts but with that opening framing line dropped. The ellipsis bridges the two sources rather than omitted material from one passage.
Horowitz frames the line inside the CEO’s job. The CEO does not have to be the creator of the vision or the story, but the CEO has to be the keeper of both. When a company cannot tell its story, Horowitz catalogs the symptoms: “These reporters don’t get it.” “Who is responsible for the strategy in this company?” “We have great technology, but need marketing help.” The story is not the mission statement and does not have to be succinct; Horowitz’s worked example is Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter to Amazon shareholders in 1997, which, by his account, got all the people who mattered on the same page as to what Amazon was about.
Read this way, the symptoms aren’t communication problems to fix downstream with better positioning. They are evidence the strategic work has not finished.