Ben Horowitz Quotes

management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence.

As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company. For example, consider the old management standard: “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” What if the employee cannot solve an important problem?

I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.

kicked out of nursery school that day. If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school. When everybody

Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate.

At a macro level, everybody views the world through her own personal prism. When interviewing candidates, it’s helpful to watch for small distinctions that indicate whether they view the world through the “me” prism or the “team” prism.

If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO. Jason

out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

Ben: “If you need me, I will come home.” Felicia: “No. Get the IPO done. There is no tomorrow for you and the company. I’ll be fine.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.

The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.

The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.

The Struggle is when food loses its taste.

The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.

The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.

The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.

The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.

The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.

The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.

The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.

Most people are not strong enough.

Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.

The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion — often the wrong conclusion.

the market itself was transforming due to an underlying technological shift:

As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age.

Once we’ve taken all of this into account, we see that the results against objectives or “black box” results are a lagging indicator. And as they say in the mutual fund prospectuses, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” The white-box CEO evaluation criteria — “Does the CEO know what to do?” and “Can the CEO get the company to do it?” — will do a much better job of predicting the future.

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.