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Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Guys
Usually
Guy
Ideas
Look
Come
Looks
Hallucinating
Like
Breakthrough

More quotes by Ben Horowitz

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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution it just needs clarity.
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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 quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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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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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 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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The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
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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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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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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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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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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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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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A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Ben Horowitz
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I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Ben Horowitz
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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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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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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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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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