Ben Horowitz Quotes

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

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.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually

Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'

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.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really really really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

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?

When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.

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.

Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.

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.

A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.