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Company Quotes by Ben Horowitz

40 Company quotes by Ben Horowitz

All Company quotes Ben Horowitz’s page

Ben Horowitz stresses that building a great tech firm starts with hiring very smart people and giving them room to work. He notes that active shareholders can push a company toward better leadership, and he reminds CEOs that endless expectations and odds are part of the job.

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As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

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The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

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In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

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“Being a good company is an end in itself.”

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The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

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When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get…

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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…

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Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

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Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.

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In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

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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…

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When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on…

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When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind…

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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…

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“People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one…

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When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when…

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Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong…

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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…

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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…

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Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match...…

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The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself…

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“When founders come in to pitch our firm—one as the CEO and the other as president—the conversation often goes like this: “Who…

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“PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO…

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Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.

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It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

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Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you…

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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…

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As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business,…

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The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are…

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If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's…

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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…

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John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse.…

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I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great…

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I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper…

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You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard…

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The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they…

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In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to…

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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…

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More by Ben Horowitz

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

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics,…

“The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up…

“As painful as it might be, I knew that we had to get into the broader market in order to understand it well enough…

“On my grandfather’s tombstone, you will find his favorite Marx quote: “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important…

“Bill Campbell: "It's not about the money." Ben Horowitz: "What's it about, Bill?" Bill: "It's about the FUCKING money.”

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better…

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

“out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.”

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…

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

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

“No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something…

“The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability…