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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.

Ben Horowitz

It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
BEN HOROWITZ

Executive Goal Quarters
Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
BEN HOROWITZ

Planning Useless Valuable
There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
BEN HOROWITZ

Bullets Consequences Silver
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Accurate Decision Good Jobs Mistake Place Reason
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
BEN HOROWITZ

Book Enemy Fighting
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
BEN HOROWITZ

Lemming Sheep Venture
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Kind Moving Quality
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Express Inspiration Jobs People
In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
BEN HOROWITZ

Company Entrepreneur Valleys
You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
BEN HOROWITZ

Better Startup
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
BEN HOROWITZ

Clarity Needs Organization
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
BEN HOROWITZ

Lenses Looks Want
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
BEN HOROWITZ

Beyonce Mark More Popular Time
I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
BEN HOROWITZ

Believe Strength Weakness
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.’
BEN HOROWITZ

Believe Musical Genius People
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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