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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Ben Horowitz

A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
BEN HOROWITZ

Excellent Job Lot Mentorship Training
The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
BEN HOROWITZ

Focus Management Stress
Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
BEN HOROWITZ

Billionaire Black Loyal Wife
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Customer Figuring Jobs Product Strategy Turns
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Accurate Decision Good Jobs Mistake Place Reason
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
BEN HOROWITZ

Communication Keys Quality
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Kind Moving Quality
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
BEN HOROWITZ

Keys Leader Management
It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
BEN HOROWITZ

Executive Goal Quarters
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
BEN HOROWITZ

Ambition Important Mission
It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
BEN HOROWITZ

Clear Customer Want
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Career Decision Emotional
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 HOROWITZ

Losing Succeed Technique
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
BEN HOROWITZ

Ask Good Ideas Notes Self
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
BEN HOROWITZ

Entrepreneur Found Needs
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
BEN HOROWITZ

Answer Culture Management
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Knowing Knowledge Gain Nothing Shortcut
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
BEN HOROWITZ

Lemming Sheep Venture
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
BEN HOROWITZ

Decision Goal Made
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 HOROWITZ

People Said Thinking
A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
BEN HOROWITZ

Manager Models Needs Role
Leadership is hard to train on.
BEN HOROWITZ

Hard Leadership Train
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Critical Decisions Talking Views
Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
BEN HOROWITZ

Planning Useless Valuable
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
BEN HOROWITZ

Bigger Management People
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
BEN HOROWITZ

Lenses Looks Want
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.
BEN HOROWITZ

Ambition Communication Mistakes

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

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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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