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
You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup...
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.
You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
One of the most vexing issues in most companies is the duplex mismatching problem.
This is a partnership where we're working deeply with Cisco, and the deal will be particularly important for us as we sell into firms using Cisco kit.
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don't have investments in.