Ben Horowitz quotes:

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 for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

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 learning process might also be called the courage development process.

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.

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.

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 subjugated to the good of the whole.

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.

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

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.

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

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

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.

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 people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.

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

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 of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

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.

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 that.

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.

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.

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.

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.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

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

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, let's go' or whatever it is that draws them.

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.

Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.

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.

I 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.

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.

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better board' can be helpful.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

As 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.

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

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

Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.

People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.

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.

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.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

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.

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

The 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?

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.

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.

Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.

The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It's a lot like life about that.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on

In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.

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.

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 the whole thing quite a bit.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.

Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.

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 to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.

When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'

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.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.

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.'

Every 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.

One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.

I try to help people with management stuff a lot.

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.

As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

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're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup...

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.

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.

Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.

When you're making a critical decision, you have to understand how it's going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you're talking to, but the people that aren't in the room. Everybody else.

I donâ??t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

There are no silver bullets...

A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they're hallucinating

It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... Eventually

It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.

A manager can't act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

I think theres 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.

Don't punk out and don't quit.

Leadership is hard to train on.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.