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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.

Ben Horowitz

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
BEN HOROWITZ

Decision Goal Made
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
BEN HOROWITZ

Lenses Looks Want
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 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.
BEN HOROWITZ

People Said Thinking
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 HOROWITZ

Ambition Communication Mistakes
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
BEN HOROWITZ

Building Great People Things
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

About Decision Made Now Recognize
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
BEN HOROWITZ

Employee Knows Management
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.
BEN HOROWITZ

Company Deal Leaves Management
It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.
BEN HOROWITZ

Daily Life Management Stress
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
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

Career Decision Emotional
A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
BEN HOROWITZ

Excellent Job Lot Mentorship Training
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
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
BEN HOROWITZ

Believe Statistics
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
BEN HOROWITZ

Answer Culture Management

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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Popular Authors

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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