If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?
BEN HOROWITZIt’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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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.
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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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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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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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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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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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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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The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
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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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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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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.
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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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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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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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