Ben Horowitz famous quotes

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

#Baby #Motivation #Hours

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

#Believe #Inspiration #Needs

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Phones #People #Important

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Mind #Stories #Remember

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

#Decision #Important #Found

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

#Goal #Decision #Made

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten 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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Technology #Two #People

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

#Role Models #Needs #Roles

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

#Wife #Black #Loyal

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Years #Lasts #Bars

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Mistake #Communication #Ambition

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.'
-- Ben Horowitz

#Believe #People #Hip Hop

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

#Investment #Stage #Great Company

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Technique #Succeed #Losing

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Running #Levels #Nonsense

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?
-- Ben Horowitz

#Jobs #Mistake #Mean

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Jobs #Inspiration #People

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

#Communication #Keys #Quality

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Moving #Quality #Kind

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Running #Lonely #Choices

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Running #Mean #Ideas

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

#Entrepreneur #Valleys #Company

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Ends

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Communication #Challenges #Company

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Thinking #People #Said

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

#Smart #People #Problem

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Believe #Weakness #I Believe

Leadership is hard to train on.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Train

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

#Book #Fighting #Enemy

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Jobs #Strategy #Turns

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Believe #Play #Odds

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Emotional #Careers #Decision

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

#Organization #Needs #Clarity

Don't punk out and don't quit.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Inspirational #Motivational #Quitting

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

#Differences #People #Vision

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Believe #Statistics #Calculus

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Knowing #Shortcuts #Conventional Wisdom

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

#People #Building #Great Things

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

#Self #Ideas #Notes

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Useless #Planning #Valuable

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

#Lenses #Looks #Want

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

#Sheep #Lemmings #Venture

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Reverse

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

#Running #Company

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Jobs #Skills #Training

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

#Keys #Leader #Being A Leader

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Running #Practice #Decision

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Majority #Example #Problem

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

#Ideas #Innovation #Looks

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.
-- Ben Horowitz

#Choices #Decision #Courageous

There are no silver bullets...
-- Ben Horowitz

#Growth #Bullets #Silver

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

#Entrepreneur #Needs #Found

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

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

#Mark

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

#Jobs #Done #Want