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 bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.
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.
The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
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.
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.