Quote

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

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
Prepares
Company
Running
Thing

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

Image
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
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.'
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
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
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
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
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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
Leadership is hard to train on.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
Image
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
Image
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
Ben Horowitz