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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Intelligence
Courage
Found
Great
Needs
Always
Ceo
Tested
Entrepreneur

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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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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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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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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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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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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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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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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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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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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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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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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