In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
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. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
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. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
You can’t worry about the mistakes, because you’re going to make a lot of them. You’ve got to be thinking about your next move. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
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. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
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. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
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. Ben Horowitz Read Quote
