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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

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Really
Large
Make
Skills
Good
Training
Mentorship
General
Combined
Company
Mentor
Jobs
Complexes
Place
Excellent
Work
Complex

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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
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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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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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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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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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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.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
Ben Horowitz
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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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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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz
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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
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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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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz