Ben Horowitz

“John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.”

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

“Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.”

“I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.”

“Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.”

“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.”

“Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.”

“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.”

“I try to help people with management stuff a lot.”

“By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.”

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

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

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

“In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.”

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