Ben Horowitz Quotes - Page 3

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

Don't punk out and don't quit.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually

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.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

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.

I think theres 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.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

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.

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

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.

If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.