Ben Horowitz Quotes

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: 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.” We eventually found investors for a series C round (meaning our third round of funding) at an amazing $700 million pre-money valuation and raised $120 million.

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.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept. People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.

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

The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product.

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays. I could not afford any hesitation, so I scheduled a daily meeting with Anthony, Jason, and the team — though they were now based in Plano. The purpose was to remove all roadblocks.

People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.” — JAY Z, “ON TO THE NEXT ONE

There is always a move.

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things.

Want to see a great company story? Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997. In telling Amazon’s story in this extended form — not as a mission statement, not as a tagline — Jeff got all the people who mattered on the same page as to what Amazon was about.

If you don’t have world-class strengths where you need them, you won’t be a world-class company.

While executives don’t age nearly as fast as athletes do, companies, markets, and technologies change a thousand times faster than the game of football.