As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
BEN HOROWITZHere’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.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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There are no silver bullets.
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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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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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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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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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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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If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?
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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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It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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You can take somebody’s job, you have to take their job, but you don’t have to take their dignity.
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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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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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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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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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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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