Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitzis an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a high technology entrepreneur and co-founder and general partner along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired for $1.6 billion in cash in July 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. In the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth13 June 1966
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup...
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.
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
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.
The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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 possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.
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.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
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 a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.