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 HOROWITZThese 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.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
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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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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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The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?
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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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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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It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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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.
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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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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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