Ben Horowitz

When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same

Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

“This the real world, homie, school finished
They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.”

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

, then race becomes a reason for making decisions in that culture and the culture often becomes racist. What you do is who you are.

And the prime cultural virtue of any startup is survive at all costs.

If I tell you someone is smart and hardworking, but neither humble nor collaborative, that’s going to bring an archetype to mind and it’s not a good one. Same with someone who is humble and collaborative but isn’t smart or hardworking. You know that person and you don’t want them