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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Decision
Excuses
Running
Everybody
Consequences
Right
Company
Popular
Intensify

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

Image
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
Image
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Leadership is hard to train on.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Don't punk out and don't quit.
Ben Horowitz
Image
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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