Ben Horowitz Quotes

Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More important, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that’s compelling enough to make people stay?

Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes.

I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.

The answer is zero.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.

We walk the same path, but got on different shoes. Live in the same building, but we got different views.” — DRAKE, “RIGHT ABOVE IT

The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text The One Minute Manager.

there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.

When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

Get their input and approval for the separation package. This will be critical for the next step. Executive packages are larger than regular severance packages and rightly so. It takes about ten times longer for an executive to find a new job than it does for an individual contributor.

One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

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.

Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.

There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it. Lead bullets.

Too often the investment in people stops there.