Ben horowitz quotes

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.

When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

I think theres a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.

It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

Leadership is hard to train on.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.

Don't punk out and don't quit.

A manager can't act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.

You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.

The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.

A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

There are no silver bullets.

Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really really really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.

For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.