Quotes from Ben Horowitz

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

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.

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.

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

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

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.

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

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

Don't punk out and don't quit.

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.

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.

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

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

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, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

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

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

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

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.