Ben Horowitz Quotes:- Ben Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Andreessen. He previously co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups, and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.
Inspirational Ben Horowitz Quotes
“Leadership is hard to train on.”
Ben Horowitz
“Hire salespeople who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger, and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.”
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
“Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.”
Ben Horowitz
“A good engineering interview will include some sets of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.”
Ben Horowitz
“In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.”
Ben Horowitz
“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
“If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.”
Ben Horowitz
40+ Powerful Ben Horowitz Quotes
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.”
Ben Horowitz
“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 board’ can be helpful.”
Ben Horowitz
“Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.”
Ben Horowitz
Famous Quotes by Ben Horowitz
“In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.”
Ben Horowitz
“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
“How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.”
Ben Horowitz
“As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what’s going on, you’re very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you’re guaranteed to fail.”
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
“I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.”
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
“I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.”
Ben Horowitz
Best Powerful Ben Horowitz Quotes
“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
“Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.”
Ben Horowitz
“When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.”
Ben Horowitz
“The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.”
Ben Horowitz
“As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.”
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
“People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.”
Ben Horowitz
“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.”
Ben Horowitz
“I’m a huge believer in clarity.”
Ben Horowitz
“Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.”
Ben Horowitz
Top 10 Quotes on Ben Horowitz
“In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.”
Ben Horowitz
“Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.”
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 laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.”
Ben Horowitz
“If somebody’s going on your board, and you’re going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.”
Ben Horowitz
“The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.”
Ben Horowitz
“Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put tremendous downward pressure on the stock.”
Ben Horowitz
“Good shareholder activists have an incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.”
Ben Horowitz
“I try to help people with management stuff a lot.”
Ben Horowitz
“Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn’t.”
Ben Horowitz
