Quotes by Ben Horowitz

About Ben Horowitz:

Ben Horowitz is 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 book, published on March 4, 2014 by HarperCollins, Horowitz offers advice on building and running a startup.
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There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.

Ben Horowitz

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

Ben Horowitz

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

Ben Horowitz

You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have t...

Ben Horowitz

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.

Ben Horowitz

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

Ben Horowitz

John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjug...

Ben Horowitz

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

Ben Horowitz

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Ben Horowitz

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

Ben Horowitz

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 use...

Ben Horowitz

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.

Ben Horowitz

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

Ben Horowitz

I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted t...

Ben Horowitz

In 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 learn...

Ben Horowitz

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

Ben Horowitz

With 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 pe...

Ben Horowitz

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.

Ben Horowitz

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

Ben Horowitz

It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it's a communication job.

Ben Horowitz

Author Bio

  • NameBen Horowitz
  • DescriptionAmerican businessman
  • BornJune 13, 1966
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionEngineer