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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
Entrepreneur
Intelligence
Courage
Found
Great
Needs
Always
Ceo
Tested
More quotes by Ben Horowitz
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
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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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
Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Ben Horowitz
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.
Ben Horowitz
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
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
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.
Ben Horowitz
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
Ben Horowitz
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
Ben Horowitz
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
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
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
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.
Ben Horowitz
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Ben Horowitz
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Ben Horowitz
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
Ben Horowitz