Ben Horowitz Quotes

You want to be liked and respected in the long run, not the short run.

Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?'

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.

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.

I describe the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want.

Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, you may also get knocked cold. Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion.

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter.

would employ a Freaky Friday management technique.

Hoping that a hardware company can be as capital-light as a consumer Internet company or trying to get Yelp to grow as fast as Twitter doesn’t make sense and can be quite destructive. CEOs should be evaluated against their company’s opportunity — not somebody else’s company.

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.

Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers — it’s strictly for amateurs.