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
You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.
The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.
It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.
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.'
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
Leadership is hard to train on.
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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.
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.