Quote

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

Ben Horowitz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
Ben Horowitz
Image
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Ben Horowitz
Image
It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Leadership is hard to train on.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Don't punk out and don't quit.
Ben Horowitz
Image
It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
Image
If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.
Ben Horowitz