Ben Horowitz Quotes
27 quotes from Ben Horowitz — Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential venture capital firms in Silicon Valley..
“The story of any company is the story of its people. And the story of any CEO is the story of how they handle the struggle.”
“In peacetime, leaders must maximize and broaden the current opportunity. As a result, peacetime leaders employ techniques to encourage broad-based creativity and contribution across a diverse set of possible objectives. In wartime, by contrast, the company typically has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target. The company's survival in wartime depends upon strict adherence and alignment to the mission.”
“The hard thing isn't setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.”
“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.”
“The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.”
“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.”
“The right thing to do is to recruit the best people you can and build the best products you can. If you do that, the profits will follow.”
“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.”
“The story of any company is the story of its people. If you get the people right, everything else follows.”
“In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.”
“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing.”
“Sometimes an organization doesn't need a solution; it just needs clarity.”
“The key to high-quality decision making is not knowledge. It is whether our knowledge is true or false, and the best way to make it more true is to turn it into a prediction and test it.”
“As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.”
“The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.”
“The venture capital business is a 100% game of outliers—it's extreme exceptions. If you're not finding a way to do something that nobody else can do, you're not going to make money in this business.”
“The most important thing I learned as an entrepreneur was that the technology industry rewards people who can see the future and build it.”
“In the technology business, you have to be willing to be wrong. The key is to be wrong quickly and cheaply.”
“The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The best entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.”
“Culture is not what you say, it's what you do. And more specifically, it's what you do when nobody's watching.”
“The culture of a company is not what the CEO says it is. It's what the CEO does when nobody's looking.”
“Your company's culture is its behavior under stress. When the pressure is on, what does your organization do? That's your culture.”
“The right culture with the wrong people is still the wrong culture.”
“The most important skill that a CEO can have is the ability to learn. Everything else can be learned, but if you can't learn, you can't adapt, and if you can't adapt, you can't survive.”
“Experience is what you got when you didn't get what you wanted.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
“Embrace the struggle. It's the only way to get better.”
