Ben Horowitz Quotes

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

products are dramatically cheaper than Apple’s. Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture — if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.

being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.

Nonetheless, at some point the monolithic design of one huge organization runs out of gas and you will need to split things into smaller subgroups. At the most basic level, you’ll want to consider giving the groups that you’ve specialized their own managers as they grow.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about — figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

Through the seemingly impossible Loudcloud series C and IPO processes, I learned one important lesson: Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

Unrelenting confidence was necessary.

If you ask, “Why am I so fat?” your brain will say, “Because I am stupid and have no willpower.” Robbins’s point is that if you ask a bad question you will get a bad answer and you will live a bad life.

However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.

Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.

Jason, the whole company is at your command. Whatever you need, I will make sure you get it. Anthony, Jason is going to work to deliver all the value that EDS expects, but he will fail. He will fail to deliver one hundred percent of expectations, so you are now in charge of finding out what they don’t expect, but want. You are in charge of finding the exciting value. When you do, we will deliver it.

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.

Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the “how”), and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out “how.” Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally. Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally.

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

Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.