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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
Great
Remains
Lowered
Years
Courage
Dramatically
Building
Advances
Company
Technological
High
Bars
Lasts
Ten
Last
Financial
Ever
Starting

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When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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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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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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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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 right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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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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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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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 quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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