Ben Horowitz

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.