Ben Horowitz Quotes
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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
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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.
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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.
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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.
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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.
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It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.
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It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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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?
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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.
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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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.
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I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
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There are no silver bullets.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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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.'
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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually
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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.
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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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