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.
BEN HOROWITZPlanning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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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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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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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 can take somebody’s job, you have to take their job, but you don’t have to take their dignity.
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The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
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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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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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.
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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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It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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 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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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right.
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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
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A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
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