Ben Horowitz

Businessman

1966-06-13

Books by Ben Horowitz

The Hard Thing About Hard Things
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Summary of the Hard Thing about Hard Things
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What You Do Is Who You Are
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Quotes by Ben Horowitz

In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
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One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.
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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.
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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.
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The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
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People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
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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.
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Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.
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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.
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The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
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