English - Businessman | June 13, 1966 -
In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
Ben Horowitz
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
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The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
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