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 HOROWITZThere are no silver bullets.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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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.
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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.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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You can take somebody’s job, you have to take their job, but you don’t have to take their dignity.
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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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.
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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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.
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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.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.
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As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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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.
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It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
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