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
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
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.
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.
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.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
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.
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.
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.