Quotes by Ben Horowitz

“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.”

“As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.”

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

“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 de...”

“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 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 afte...”

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

“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.”

“Leadership is hard to train on.”

“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'...”

“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 straightforw...”

“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.”

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

“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 consequen...”

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

“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.”

“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 l...”

“Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?'”

“Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”