Words matter. These are the best Ben Horowitz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, ‘Let’s get a better board’ can be helpful.
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren’t management books out there that could help me.
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.
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.
It helps to have founded and run a company if you’re going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
Some libertarians say, ‘Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.’ But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn’t earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren’t very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don’t recover because trust is broken. And if you’re not honest at the point where you’re breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.
If I’m in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what’s possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that’s a valuable thing.
Rap helps me connect emotionally.
People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is ‘Don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.’
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.
I’m a huge believer in clarity.
I think there’s 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.
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.
John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there’s something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.
It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it’s a communication job.
Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that – it’s hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate ’em.
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
Leadership is hard to train on.
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn’t.
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
Look – this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do – ultimately, you’re at the end.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
