Benahorowitz.Eth Quotes
3 min readFeb 2, 2023
- One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- 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.’
- Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
- Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- 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.
- Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
- The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
- The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
- 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.
- In boxing, you get hit, it’s painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
- A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.
- Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
