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
Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
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.
John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
A good engineering interview will include some set 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.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
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.
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.
If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.
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.
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.