Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Ben Horowitz - Page 2

I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It's a lot like life about that.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'

By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.

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.

I think there's 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.

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, 'Why am I doing this?' You don't ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, 'I know why I'm doing it, I need the money, let's go' or whatever it is that draws them.

One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.

It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it's a communication job.

A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate's knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

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.

You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.

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.

It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.

A manager can't act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

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.

As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

There are no silver bullets.

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.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.

You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

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

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.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

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.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

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. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.

The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.

Don't punk out and don't quit.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'