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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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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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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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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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 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.
Ben Horowitz
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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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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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It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
Ben Horowitz
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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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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
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Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
Ben Horowitz
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Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'
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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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
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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