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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
Enemy
Wartime
Books
Consultants
Written
Ceo
Fighting
Managed
Read
Management
Book
Fruit
Never
Busy
Stand

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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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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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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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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