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
You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.
Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
I believe in strength over lack of weakness.
If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
Your employees know each other better than they know you.
The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.
Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.