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 HOROWITZWhen 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.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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 are no silver bullets.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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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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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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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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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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It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.
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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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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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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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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
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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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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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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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Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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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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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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