In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
BEN HOROWITZTo 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.
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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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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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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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If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?
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The person they’re working with, is going to be the person they’ll know more. So if that person leaves, they’re going to go – well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
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I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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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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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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Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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 trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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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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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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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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There are no silver bullets.
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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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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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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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