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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
Running
Thing
Prepares
Company

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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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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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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
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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.'
Ben Horowitz
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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
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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
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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
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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
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Leadership is hard to train on.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Ben Horowitz
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
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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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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Ben Horowitz
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
Ben Horowitz
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz