Ben Horowitz

You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

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.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don't have investments in.

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

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.

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

I'm a huge believer in clarity.

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

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.

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.'

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.