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.
BEN HOROWITZRelationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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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.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
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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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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.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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.
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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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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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There are no silver bullets.
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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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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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The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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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.
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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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