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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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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Shortcuts
Knowing
Gained
Knowledge
Conventional
Experience
Following
Nothing
Worse
Especially
Personal
Relying
Wisdom
More quotes by 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
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.
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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.
Ben Horowitz
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
Ben Horowitz
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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
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
It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
Ben Horowitz
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.
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
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
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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
