It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it's a communication job.
Ben Horowitz
With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
Ben Horowitz
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
Ben Horowitz
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.
Ben Horowitz
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
Ben Horowitz
To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
Ben Horowitz
You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
Ben Horowitz
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
Ben Horowitz
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
Ben Horowitz
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
Ben Horowitz
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
Ben Horowitz
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.
Ben Horowitz
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
Ben Horowitz
You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
Ben Horowitz
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
Ben Horowitz
The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It's a lot like life about that.
Ben Horowitz
You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
Ben Horowitz
From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
Ben Horowitz
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Ben Horowitz
As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
Ben Horowitz
I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.
Ben Horowitz
You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
Ben Horowitz
When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.
Ben Horowitz
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
In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
Ben Horowitz
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.
Ben Horowitz
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
Ben Horowitz