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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.

Ben Horowitz

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
BEN HOROWITZ

Ambition Important Mission
It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
BEN HOROWITZ

Clear Customer Want
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Choice Consequences Life Magnified Plentiful Wrong
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Losing Succeed Technique
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
BEN HOROWITZ

Decision Found Important
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
BEN HOROWITZ

Ideas Innovation Looks
Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
BEN HOROWITZ

Inspirational Motivational Quit
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Mind Remember Stories
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Customer Figuring Jobs Product Strategy Turns
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Choice Courageous Decision
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
BEN HOROWITZ

Anything Effort Knows Someone Something
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Knowing Knowledge Gain Nothing Shortcut
Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.
BEN HOROWITZ

Length Management Years
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Company Deal Leaves Management
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
BEN HOROWITZ

Answer Culture Management
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
BEN HOROWITZ

Bigger Management People

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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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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Popular Authors

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