Ben Horowitz Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von 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.

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.

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 the whole thing quite a bit.

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 subjugated to the good of the whole.

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

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

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.

Ben Horowitz

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

Ben Horowitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Horowitz

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.

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

As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.

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

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

Ben Horowitz

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.

Ben Horowitz

If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.

Ben Horowitz

Leadership is hard to train on.

Ben Horowitz

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.

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 check.

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

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

Ben Horowitz

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

Ben Horowitz

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

Ben Horowitz

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 that.

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