Ben Horowitz Quotes

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

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

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

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.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.

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

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

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

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 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.

There are no silver bullets.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

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

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

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

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

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.

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

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

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.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

Leadership is hard to train on.

For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.

It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

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.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

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.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

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

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

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.

Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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