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
jobs mistake mean
The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
mistake communication ambition
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.
jobs mistake decision
Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.
mistake team organization
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.
adding currently easy goes linked load network requires switch system visibility web
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.
depends
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
based next wartime
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.
deal deeply sell using
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.
companies issues
One of the most vexing issues in most companies is the duplex mismatching problem.
buy founder terror
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.
identify knowledge position valuable
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.
asking awake books business experience laying management questions
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.
ability compared design difficult far firing hiring keeping learned manage master mind relatively skill skills
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.
If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.