Top 120 Ben Horowitz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.”

— Ben Horowitz

2. “As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.”

— Ben Horowitz

3. “Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.”

— Ben Horowitz

4. “A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.”

— Ben Horowitz

5. “I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.”

— Ben Horowitz

6. “As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.”

— Ben Horowitz

7. “The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.”

— Ben Horowitz

8. “Don’t punk out and don’t quit.”

— Ben Horowitz

9. “The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.”

— Ben Horowitz

10. “Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.”

— Ben Horowitz

11. “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits – in that order.”

— Ben Horowitz

12. “Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.”

— Ben Horowitz

13. “There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”

— Ben Horowitz

14. “You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.”

— Ben Horowitz

15. “The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.”

— Ben Horowitz

16. “Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.”

— Ben Horowitz

17. “There are no silver bullets...”

— Ben Horowitz

18. “A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.”

— Ben Horowitz

19. “Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.”

— Ben Horowitz

20. “How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.”

— Ben Horowitz

21. “It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about – figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.”

— Ben Horowitz

22. “When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.”

— Ben Horowitz

23. “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.”

— Ben Horowitz

24. “Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.”

— Ben Horowitz

25. “In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.”

— Ben Horowitz

26. “The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.”

— Ben Horowitz

27. “Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.”

— Ben Horowitz

28. “Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.”

— Ben Horowitz

29. “Startup CEOs should not play the odds. 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.”

— Ben Horowitz

30. “That’s the hard thing about hard things – there is no formula for dealing with them.”

— Ben Horowitz

31. “Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.”

— Ben Horowitz

32. “I believe in strength over lack of weakness.”

— Ben Horowitz

33. “One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.”

— Ben Horowitz

34. “Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating.”

— Ben Horowitz

35. “That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision – it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”

— Ben Horowitz

36. “Ironically, the key to an emotional discussion is to take the emotion out of it.”

— Ben Horowitz

37. “To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.”

— Ben Horowitz

38. “There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”

— Ben Horowitz

39. “You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.”

— Ben Horowitz

40. “Leadership is hard to train on.”

— Ben Horowitz

41. “When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.”

— Ben Horowitz

42. “Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.”

— Ben Horowitz

43. “There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.”

— Ben Horowitz

44. “I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”

— Ben Horowitz

45. “The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste.”

— Ben Horowitz

46. “Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture – if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.”

— Ben Horowitz

47. “Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process.”

— Ben Horowitz

48. “Perks are good, but they are not culture.”

— Ben Horowitz

49. “Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.”

— Ben Horowitz

50. “Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.”

— Ben Horowitz