Ben Horowitz
It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.Collection: Stress
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.Collection: Years
One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.Collection: People
The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.Collection: Moving
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.Collection: Book
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.Collection: Mistake
The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.Collection: Eye
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'Collection: Lenses
What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.Collection: Sheep
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.Collection: Entrepreneur
Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.Collection: Reverse
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.Collection: Emotional
I believe in strength over lack of weakness.Collection: Believe
Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.Collection: Effort
There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.Collection: Bullets
The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.Collection: Culture
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.Collection: Jobs
Don't punk out and don't quit.Collection: Inspirational
A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.Collection: Keys
You can take somebody's job, you have to take their job, but you don't have to take their dignity.Collection: Jobs
Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.Collection: Useless
Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly RowlingsCollection: Mark
Yeah, I became a successful entrepreneur... EventuallyCollection: Successful
It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.Collection: Goal
For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.Collection: Majority
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.Collection: Thinking
The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.Collection: Should Have
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.Collection: Years
It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.Collection: Want
If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?Collection: Jobs
If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.Collection: Mistake
The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.Collection: People
Your employees know each other better than they know you.Collection: Management
Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.Collection: Jobs