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
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
System administrators will get visibility into which servers are linked to which network devices. Currently when a switch goes down it's not easy to see which servers are impacted. Also, adding a new web server to a load balancer currently requires the load balancer to be updated.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
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.
This is a partnership where we're working deeply with Cisco, and the deal will be particularly important for us as we sell into firms using Cisco kit.
One of the most vexing issues in most companies is the duplex mismatching problem.
Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
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.
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.
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.