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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.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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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.
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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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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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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.
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In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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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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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.
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