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There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Bullet
Options
Bullets
Silver
Consequences
Consequence
Always

More quotes by 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.
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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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You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
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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.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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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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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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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.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
Ben Horowitz
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The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
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Don't punk out and don't quit.
Ben Horowitz
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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