Your employees know each other better than they know you.
BEN HOROWITZYou’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.
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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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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In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right.
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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
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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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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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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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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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