Top 120 Ben Horowitz Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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

52. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

56. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

59. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

66. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

69. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

76. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

80. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

86. “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

87. “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

88. “A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved.”

— Ben Horowitz

89. “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

90. “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.”

— Ben Horowitz

91. “Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.”

— Ben Horowitz

92. “The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well and reference-checked great, that does not mean she will perform superbly in your company. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.”

— Ben Horowitz

93. “A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards – not punishes – people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.”

— Ben Horowitz

94. “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

95. “My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.”

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

97. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz