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
A manager can't act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.
In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
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.
Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.
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.
If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?
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.
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.
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.