Quotes from Ben Horowitz

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.

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.

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

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

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 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.

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.

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

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 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?

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

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

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.

I'm a huge believer in clarity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Leadership is hard to train on.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.