Quotes from 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.

I think theres 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.

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.

You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.

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.

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

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.

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.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

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

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

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.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

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

You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.

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.

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.

I try to help people with management stuff a lot.

Early in my career as an engineer, I'd learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

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