Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitzis an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a high technology entrepreneur and co-founder and general partner along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired for $1.6 billion in cash in July 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. In the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth13 June 1966
Ben Horowitz quotes about
There are no silver bullets...
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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.
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.
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.
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
I think theres a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.