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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.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Last
Financial
Ever
Starting
Great
Remains
Lowered
Years
Courage
Dramatically
Building
Advances
Company
Technological
High
Bars
Lasts
Ten

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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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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 bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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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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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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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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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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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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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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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 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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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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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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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