Quote

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

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
Formal
Raises
Management
Save
Answer
Answers
Culture
Right

More quotes by 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
Image
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
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
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Ben Horowitz
Image
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
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
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
Image
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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
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.
Ben Horowitz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
Ben Horowitz
Image
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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
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