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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
Nothing
Following
Worse
Especially
Personal
Wisdom
Relying
Knowing
Shortcuts
Knowledge
Gained
Experience
Conventional
More quotes by Ben Horowitz
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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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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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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
Ben Horowitz
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
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.
Ben Horowitz
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
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.
Ben Horowitz
Don't punk out and don't quit.
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.
Ben Horowitz
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Ben Horowitz
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
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.
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