Quote

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

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Always
Choices
Excuse
Magnified
Life
Wrong
Decisions
Plentiful
Faces
Lonely
Fold
Making
Consequence
Ceo
Difficult
Choice
Folds
Easy
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Excuses
Running
Everybody
Consequences
Right
Company
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Intensify

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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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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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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.
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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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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 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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It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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.
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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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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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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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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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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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Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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