Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating
BEN HOROWITZThe only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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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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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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.
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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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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.
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In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
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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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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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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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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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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
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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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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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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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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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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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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.
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Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur… Eventually
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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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There are no silver bullets.
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