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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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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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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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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 important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
Ben Horowitz
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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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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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Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
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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What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Ben Horowitz