Ben Horowitz

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.

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.

The key to high-quality communication is trust, and it's hard to trust somebody that you don't know.

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.

Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.

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.

The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

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 implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

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.

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.