Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
BEN HOROWITZThe 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.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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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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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.
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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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Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
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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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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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 lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
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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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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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Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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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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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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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As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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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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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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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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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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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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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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