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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
Courage
Company
Solvers
Business
Competitiveness
Problem
Sales
Really
Hire
People
Hunger
Lack
Smart

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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.
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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.
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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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.
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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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.'
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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.
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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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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.
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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