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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.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Read
Management
Book
Fruit
Never
Busy
Stand
Enemy
Wartime
Books
Consultants
Written
Ceo
Fighting
Managed

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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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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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Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
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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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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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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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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.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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.
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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 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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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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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.
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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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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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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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