Ben Horowitz Quotes

New things get noticed. This means you can't be afraid to present something new to your market, even if it's just a variation or an addition to an already-existing product or service.

You've got to figure out how you're going to come in and significantly impact and redefine a market such that you become a market share leader in it.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.

No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.

The top principle for disruptive and sustaining innovation is that it has to have a laser focus on customers. Innovation begins with their needs and expectations.

Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.

Unless you stay focused on innovation, you can be disintermediated.

Our employees and competitors thought we were docile. We want to be defiantly disruptive. I don't mean necessarily by launching price wars but by being the best at the basics - having the best customer service, the best on-time performance, the best coffee - in a thoughtful, not a testosterone-laced, way.

If Dell's going to be a fast follower, then we'll continue to innovate.

The market is so competitive. There are so many products that are similar. So we are forced to invest in innovative research in new products that are one or two years ahead of the market.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market.

As great as you believe your new product or company is, the world got along just fine without you. The greatest competition every startup faces is convincing consumers that there is a better solution to the problems that vex them.

Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

You need more than just a great idea. Your product or service must add an enormous amount of value to some industry. If the idea isn't completely new, it has to be better, cheaper, or more efficient than what we already have.

The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

I want to create something like Sony. Not in terms of manufacturing products but creating something that is innovative, makes money, improves peoples' lives.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.