It's More Important To Be Brave Than Smart, Says Top VC

Ben Horowitz is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the highest-performing venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.

He's also the author of a best-selling book about his entrepreneurship days, called The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Earlier this week, Horowitz gave a keynote interview at the DLD conference in Munich.

He said five interesting things:

• The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs is to keep your own mind from attacking you. Entrepreneurs must focus on solving their actual problems, rather than the ones they create in their minds
• The best way for an entrepreneur to succeed is to go "all in" - to commit their entire livelihoods to their companies, so that when the work gets awful and you want to quit, you have no choice but to keep going.
• By definition, innovative ideas look like bad ideas. If they didn't, everyone would have them. Big companies are supremely effective at getting rid of these kinds of bad ideas.
• Being an entrepreneur is more a test of courage than intelligence.
• Technologies are neither good nor bad, they just…are. It's up to us to figure out how to use them to benefit society. Technology has helped us survive as a species many times, and we will need it many times in the future.