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.
BEN HOROWITZIt’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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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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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.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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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 my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
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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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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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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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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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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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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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