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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
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Always
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Plentiful
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More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
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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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
Ben Horowitz
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Ben Horowitz
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Ben Horowitz
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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
Ben Horowitz