When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
BEN HOROWITZA lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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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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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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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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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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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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I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
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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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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 don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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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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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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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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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.
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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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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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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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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
BEN HOROWITZ