Ben Horowitz's Quotes
Born: 1966-06-13
Profession: Businessman
Nation: English
Biography of Ben Horowitz
In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.
Tags: Born, Life, NonsenseIn my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
Tags: Courage, Decisions, ExperienceIn Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
Tags: Company, Private, WrongAs companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.
Tags: Control, Difficult, ProblemsEvery time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
Tags: Decision, Hard, TimeHere's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'
Tags: Great, Saying, SocietyHow do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
Tags: Good, Training, WorkI 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.
Tags: Mean, Pretty, WrongIn all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
Tags: Courage, Death, LearningIn life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
Tags: Life, Lonely, WrongThe important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
Tags: Education, Everybody, TimeThe thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Tags: Job, Mean, MistakesWhen 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.
Tags: Business, Job, MusicWith communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
Tags: Big, Once, Technology