Top 100 Ben Horowitz Quotes
#1. You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup ...
Ben Horowitz
#2. There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
Ben Horowitz
#3. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don't know anything.
Ben Horowitz
#4. In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
Ben Horowitz
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#8. We take care of the people, the products, and the profits - in that order." It's a simple saying, but it's deep. "Taking care of the people" is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don't do it, the other two won't matter. Taking
Ben Horowitz
#9. Ben: "If you need me, I will come home." Felicia: "No. Get the IPO done. There is no tomorrow for you and the company. I'll be fine.
Ben Horowitz
#10. Bill Campbell: "It's not about the money."
Ben Horowitz: "What's it about, Bill?"
Bill: "It's about the FUCKING money.
Ben Horowitz
#11. I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
Ben Horowitz
#12. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#13. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#14. The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Ben Horowitz
#15. Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
Ben Horowitz
#16. work long hours to advance the career of my
Ben Horowitz
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, 'Why am I doing this?' You don't ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, 'I know why I'm doing it, I need the money, let's go' or whatever it is that draws them.
Ben Horowitz
#20. In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
Ben Horowitz
#21. a company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.
Ben Horowitz
#22. Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
#23. MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS
Ben Horowitz
#24. The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text The One Minute Manager.
Ben Horowitz
#25. One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
Ben Horowitz
#26. Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.
Ben Horowitz
#27. Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. Things go wrong because building a multifaceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard.
Ben Horowitz
#28. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#29. When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.
Ben Horowitz
#30. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#31. If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
Ben Horowitz
#32. Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Ben Horowitz
#33. Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
Ben Horowitz
#34. Dr. Seuss's management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle. SCREENING
Ben Horowitz
#35. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.
Ben Horowitz
#39. The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
Ben Horowitz
#40. I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
Ben Horowitz
#42. Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, What am I not doing?
Ben Horowitz
#43. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#44. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#45. The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
Ben Horowitz
#46. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#47. How will your new job differ from your current job?
Ben Horowitz
#48. 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
#50. Yes, yoga may make your company a better place to work for people who like yoga. It may also be a great team-building exercise for people who like yoga. Nonetheless, it's not culture.
Ben Horowitz
#51. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#52. From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
Ben Horowitz
#54. In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
Ben Horowitz
#55. Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
Ben Horowitz
#56. even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp.
Ben Horowitz
#57. The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It's a lot like life about that.
Ben Horowitz
#58. If you don't have world-class strengths where you need them, you won't be a world-class company.
Ben Horowitz
#59. 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
#60. It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
#61. You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
Ben Horowitz
#62. What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
#63. At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly.
Ben Horowitz
#64. The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
Ben Horowitz
#65. When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
Ben Horowitz
#67. One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
Ben Horowitz
#68. Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
#69. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#70. 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
#71. Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.
Ben Horowitz
#73. You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
Ben Horowitz
#74. As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.
Ben Horowitz
#75. You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
Ben Horowitz
#76. Sometimes an organization doesn't need a solution; it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
#77. 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
#78. If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.
Ben Horowitz
#79. As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
Ben Horowitz
#80. It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
Ben Horowitz
#81. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#82. 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
#83. Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.
Ben Horowitz
#84. The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'
Ben Horowitz
#85. The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.
Ben Horowitz
#86. you do nothing else, be like Bill and build a
Ben Horowitz
#87. Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new executive. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand.
Ben Horowitz
#88. It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
Ben Horowitz
#90. Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
Ben Horowitz
#91. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#92. DOGS AT WORK AND YOGA AREN'T CULTURE Startups
Ben Horowitz
#93. While executives don't age nearly as fast as athletes do, companies, markets, and technologies change a thousand times faster than the game of football. As
Ben Horowitz
#94. A key thing in being a leader is you've got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
#95. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime
Ben Horowitz
#96. I describe the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing
Ben Horowitz
#97. Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our Web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that's going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets." Oh snap.
Ben Horowitz
#98. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#99. You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
Ben Horowitz
#100. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.
Ben Horowitz
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