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
beyond certain communication critical entire fad mass paying people population technology using
With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
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In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
technology two people
The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.
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.
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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.
areas ceo certain company designing job knowing proper time
I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.