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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.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Emotional
Objective
Learned
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Decision
Decisions
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More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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.
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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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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 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.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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.
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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. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
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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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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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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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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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.
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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