Quote

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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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
People
Quite
Imagined
Impossible
Manage
Company
Mistakes
Possible
Size
Certain
Organization
Kind
Behavior
Behaviors
Things
Team
Incompetence
Never
Mistake
Associated

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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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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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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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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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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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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.
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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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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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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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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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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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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.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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