Quotes by Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz

American businessman, investor, blogger, and author

Lived from: 1966 -

Category: Business and entrepreneurs | Writers (Contemporary)

Born: 13 june 1966

Quotes 1 till 20 of 58.

1 2 3 Next 
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.'
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • 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.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
  • In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
    Ben Horowitz
    - +
     0
1 2 3 Next 
All Ben Horowitz famous quotes and sayings you will always find on greatest-quotations.com