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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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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Business
Competitiveness
Problem
Sales
Really
Hire
People
Hunger
Lack
Smart
Courage
Company
Solvers

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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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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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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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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.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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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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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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