Top 100 Ben Horowitz Quotes
#1. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.
Marc Andreessen
#2. Bill Campbell: "It's not about the money."
Ben Horowitz: "What's it about, Bill?"
Bill: "It's about the FUCKING money.
Ben Horowitz
#4. 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
#5. Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
Ben Horowitz
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. How will your new job differ from your current job?
Ben Horowitz
#13. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.
Ben Horowitz
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, What am I not doing?
Ben Horowitz
#21. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#23. In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
Ben Horowitz
#24. I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
Ben Horowitz
#25. The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
Ben Horowitz
#26. You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.
Ben Horowitz
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.
Ben Horowitz
#30. 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
#31. If you don't know what you want, the chances that you'll get it are extremely low.
Ben Horowitz
#32. 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
#33. Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
#34. Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.
Ben Horowitz
#35. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#36. One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
Ben Horowitz
#38. Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.
Ben Horowitz
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
#43. 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
#44. It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
#45. 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
#46. When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.
Ben Horowitz
#48. If you don't have world-class strengths where you need them, you won't be a world-class company.
Ben Horowitz
#49. 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
#50. even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp.
Ben Horowitz
#51. Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
Ben Horowitz
#52. Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
#53. The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.
Ben Horowitz
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. work long hours to advance the career of my
Ben Horowitz
#57. One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
Ben Horowitz
#58. By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
Ben Horowitz
#59. Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
Ben Horowitz
#60. The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Ben Horowitz
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
Ben Horowitz
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
Ben Horowitz
#72. Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
#73. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don't know anything.
Ben Horowitz
#74. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
Ben Horowitz
#75. There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
Ben Horowitz
#76. You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup ...
Ben Horowitz
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Dr. Seuss's management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle. SCREENING
Ben Horowitz
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Ben Horowitz
#82. you need to ask yourself, "If our company isn't good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?
Ben Horowitz
#83. A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
#84. 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
#85. Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Ben Horowitz
#86. If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
Ben Horowitz
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.
Ben Horowitz
#92. One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
Ben Horowitz
#93. The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text The One Minute Manager.
Ben Horowitz
#94. MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS
Ben Horowitz
#95. Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
#96. Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
Ben Horowitz
#97. I don't believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
#98. a company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.
Ben Horowitz
#99. In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
Ben Horowitz
#100. 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
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