Ben Horowitz Quotes - Page 2

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.

There are no silver bullets.

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.

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

The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.

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

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?

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.

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

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

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

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

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

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.

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.

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.'

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

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.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

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.

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.

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.