BEN HOROWITZ

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

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

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.

If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.

Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

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.

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

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.

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

As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.

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.

It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it's a communication job.

I try to help people with management stuff a lot.

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

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

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.

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

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

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

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

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.

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