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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I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, e...

Ben Horowitz

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...

Ben Horowitz

The 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.

Ben Horowitz

The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

Ben Horowitz

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

Ben Horowitz

Here'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.'

Ben Horowitz

Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if t...

Ben Horowitz

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

Ben Horowitz

In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

Ben Horowitz

How 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.

Ben Horowitz

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Ben Horowitz

I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.

Ben Horowitz

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot o...

Ben Horowitz

Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.

Ben Horowitz

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.

Ben Horowitz

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.

Ben Horowitz

I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, 'Why am I doing this?' You don't ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, 'I know why I'm doing it, I need the money...

Ben Horowitz

The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

Ben Horowitz

If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.

Ben Horowitz

Leadership is hard to train on.

Ben Horowitz

In 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...

Ben Horowitz

Author Bio

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