Ben Horowitz

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

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.

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better board' can be helpful.

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

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.

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.

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

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

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

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