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

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Company
Running
Thing
Prepares

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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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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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.
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Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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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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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It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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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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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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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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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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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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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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