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" In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful. "

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" 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. "

Ben Horowitz

Technology

People

Think

" Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing. "

" When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job. "

Ben Horowitz

Business

Music

" In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.' "

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

" Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job. "

" The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm a huge believer in clarity. "

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

" Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end. "

" Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover. "

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

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

Ben Horowitz

Intelligence

Experience

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