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Your employees know each other better than they know you.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Better
Employees
Employee
Management

More quotes by 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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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
Ben Horowitz
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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Ben Horowitz
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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
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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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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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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
Ben Horowitz
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
Ben Horowitz
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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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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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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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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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
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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
Ben Horowitz
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The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
Ben Horowitz