Ben Horowitz Quotes

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

The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

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.

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.

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.

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.

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

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.

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.

you need to ask yourself, "If our company isn't good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.

Leadership is hard to train on.

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.

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 first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.

a company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.

With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Gentlemen, I've done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I've developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.

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

you do nothing else, be like Bill and build a

I'd learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell's instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.

Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS

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.

Dr. Seuss's management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle. SCREENING

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don't quit and you don't know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don't believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can't hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is the Struggle.

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.

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

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.

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.

The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

How will your new job differ from your current job?

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.

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

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

If you don't know what you want, the chances that you'll get it are extremely low.

The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text The One Minute Manager.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

Without trust, communication breaks. Here's why: In any human interaction the required amount of community is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

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

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

Don't punk out and don't quit.

Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

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.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

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

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.

Bill Campbell: "It's not about the money."
Ben Horowitz: "What's it about, Bill?"
Bill: "It's about the FUCKING money.

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

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

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.

If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.

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.

You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

DOGS AT WORK AND YOGA AREN'T CULTURE Startups

If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp.

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.

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.

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.

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

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

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.

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.

The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that's possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data;

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.

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.

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'