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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.

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
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Magnified
Life
Wrong
Decisions
Plentiful
Faces
Lonely
Fold
Making
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Difficult
Choice
Folds
Easy
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Running
Everybody
Consequences
Right
Company
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Intensify

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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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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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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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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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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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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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