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
I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.
It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.
The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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.
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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.
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.