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
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
Leadership is hard to train on.
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
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.
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.
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.
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.
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.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
System administrators will get visibility into which servers are linked to which network devices. Currently when a switch goes down it's not easy to see which servers are impacted. Also, adding a new web server to a load balancer currently requires the load balancer to be updated.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate's knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.
People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.