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.
BEN HOROWITZMark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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There are no silver bullets.
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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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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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A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
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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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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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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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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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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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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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It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.
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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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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 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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