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Leadership is hard to train on.
Ben Horowitz
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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Train
Leadership
Hard
More quotes by 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.
Ben Horowitz
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
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
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Ben Horowitz
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
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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.
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 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
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
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.
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
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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.'
Ben Horowitz
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
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
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
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Ben Horowitz