Ben Horowitz Quotes

This the real world, homie, school finished They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.” — KANYE WEST, “GORGEOUS

Good product managers create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives.

Every CEO likes to say she runs a great company. It’s hard to tell whether the claim is true until the company or the CEO has to do something really difficult.

When I was at HP, we ran all the businesses by the numbers with extremely strict revenue and margin targets. Some divisions made their numbers, but did so by underfunding R&D. They dramatically weakened their long-term competitive position and set themselves up for future disaster.

Even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say, “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the buildup and then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it, and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation, and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

I said that Oxide was simply another product line. This statement deeply worried two of my employees who had graduated from Stanford Business School. They scheduled an appointment and presented me with a slide deck detailing why my decision to start Oxide was quixotic, misguided, and downright stupid. They argued that it would steal precious resources from our core business while pursuing a product that would surely fail. I let them present all forty-five slides without my asking them a single question. When they finished I said, “Did I ask for this presentation?” Those were the first words I spoke as I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO.

At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

As success drives the need to hire new engineers at a rapid rate, companies neglect to train the new engineers properly. As the engineers are assigned tasks, they figure out how to complete them as best they can. Often this means replicating existing facilities in the architecture, which leads to inconsistencies in the user experience, performance problems, and a general mess. And you thought training was expensive.

If you want people to treat every corporate nickel like it’s their own, then having them stay at the Red Roof Inn sends a better cultural signal than having them stay at the Four Seasons — but if you want them to have the confidence to ask for a $5 million order, the opposite might be true. If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.

I never built that contingency plan. 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.

There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch parties but no landing parties.

In his classic book Only the Paranoid Survive,

As already noted, courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right.

Once we pushed the Opsware stock price back above $1, the next problem was to rebuild the executive team. We had cloud services executives, but now we were a software company and needed software executives. In enterprise software companies, the two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.