Top 120 Ben Horowitz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.”

— Ben Horowitz

52. “It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.”

— Ben Horowitz

53. “You can take somebody’s job, you have to take their job, but you don’t have to take their dignity.”

— Ben Horowitz

54. “In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.”

— Ben Horowitz

55. “The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.”

— Ben Horowitz

56. “When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’”

— Ben Horowitz

57. “The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.”

— Ben Horowitz

58. “Here’s Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can’t even deal with him because he’s always saying something that people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe Kanye said that. I can’t believe he did that.’”

— Ben Horowitz

59. “In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.”

— Ben Horowitz

60. “You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup...”

— Ben Horowitz

61. “As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.”

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

63. “If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?”

— Ben Horowitz

64. “For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.”

— Ben Horowitz

65. “The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.”

— Ben Horowitz

66. “A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.”

— Ben Horowitz

67. “The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.”

— Ben Horowitz

68. “The person they’re working with, is going to be the person they’ll know more. So if that person leaves, they’re going to go – well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.”

— Ben Horowitz

69. “Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.”

— Ben Horowitz

70. “Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.”

— Ben Horowitz

71. “I think theres a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.”

— Ben Horowitz

72. “I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.”

— Ben Horowitz

73. “It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.”

— Ben Horowitz

74. “Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.”

— Ben Horowitz

75. “Your employees know each other better than they know you.”

— Ben Horowitz

76. “If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.”

— Ben Horowitz

77. “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.”

— Ben Horowitz

78. “Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction the required amount of community is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”

— Ben Horowitz

79. “Build a culture that rewards – not punishes – people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.”

— Ben Horowitz

80. “Enforce functional training by withholding new employee requisitions. As Andy Grove writes, there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program for the TBH, “To Be Hired.”

— Ben Horowitz

81. “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.”

— Ben Horowitz

82. “Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do.”

— Ben Horowitz

83. “We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.”

— Ben Horowitz

84. “The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”

— Ben Horowitz

85. “Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.”

— Ben Horowitz

86. “From an evolutionary standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.”

— Ben Horowitz

87. “It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.”

— Ben Horowitz

88. “All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do.”

— Ben Horowitz

89. “If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.”

— Ben Horowitz

90. “As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company. For example, consider the old management standard: “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” What if the employee cannot solve an important problem?”

— Ben Horowitz

91. “During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say.”

— Ben Horowitz

92. “Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.”

— Ben Horowitz

93. “Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

— Ben Horowitz

94. “Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

— Ben Horowitz

95. “A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.”

— Ben Horowitz

96. “Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.”

— Ben Horowitz

97. “The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.”

— Ben Horowitz

98. “In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right.”

— Ben Horowitz

99. “In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”

— Ben Horowitz

100. “Everybody wanted to show me the org chart, to make sure I understood the pecking order. I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”

— Ben Horowitz