You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
BEN HOROWITZNothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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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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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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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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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 CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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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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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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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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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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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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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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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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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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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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There are no silver bullets.
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