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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.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Capitalist
Sheep
Cross
Crosses
Lemmings
Capitalists
Herd
Herds
Venture

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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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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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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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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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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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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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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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