In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
BEN HOROWITZThere is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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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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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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There are no silver bullets.
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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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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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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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There are no silver bullets.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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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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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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When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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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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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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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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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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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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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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