Ben Horowitz Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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