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

Ben Horowitz

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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Choice Courageous Decision
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
BEN HOROWITZ

Answer Culture Management
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.’
BEN HOROWITZ

Believe Musical Genius People
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
BEN HOROWITZ

Anything Effort Knows Someone Something
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
BEN HOROWITZ

Ask Good Ideas Notes Self
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
BEN HOROWITZ

Guy Hallucinating Ideas Looks
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Ambition Communication Mistakes
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Kind Moving Quality
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
BEN HOROWITZ

Decision Goal Made
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

People Said Thinking
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Knowing Knowledge Gain Nothing Shortcut
There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
BEN HOROWITZ

Bullets Consequences Silver
Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
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Planning Useless Valuable
It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
BEN HOROWITZ

Executive Goal Quarters
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
BEN HOROWITZ

Beyonce Mark More Popular Time
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Bar Company Lasts Lower Years

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

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

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