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 HOROWITZIn a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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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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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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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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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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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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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In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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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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