Best 64 quotes of Ben Horowitz on MyQuotes

Ben Horowitz

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    Don't punk out and don't quit.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.'

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    There are no silver bullets.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

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

  • By Anonym
    Ben Horowitz

    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.