A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
BEN HOROWITZThere are no silver bullets.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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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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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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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 life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
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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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There are no silver bullets.
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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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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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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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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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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It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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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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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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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