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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
Always
Bullet
Options
Bullets
Silver
Consequences
Consequence

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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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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
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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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Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
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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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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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.
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Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
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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.
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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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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
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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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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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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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