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

101. “Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.”

— Ben Horowitz

102. “The best way to mitigate both the Peter Principle and the Law of Crappy People is with a properly constructed and highly disciplined promotion process.”

— Ben Horowitz

103. “No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion – often the wrong conclusion.”

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

105. “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

106. “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our Web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” Oh snap.”

— Ben Horowitz

107. “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

108. “There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time. Mark.”

— Ben Horowitz

109. “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

110. “As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age.”

— Ben Horowitz

111. “In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.”

— Ben Horowitz

112. “Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.”

— Ben Horowitz

113. “While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back – with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind.”

— Ben Horowitz

114. “Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.”

— Ben Horowitz

115. “Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.”

— Ben Horowitz

116. “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

117. “Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: They tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues.”

— Ben Horowitz

118. “What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?”

— Ben Horowitz

119. “People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.”

— Ben Horowitz

120. “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon.”

— Ben Horowitz

121. “Unrelenting confidence was necessary.”

— Ben Horowitz

122. “I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.”

— Ben Horowitz

123. “Perhaps most important, set a high and clear standard for performance. If you want to have a world-class company, you must make sure that the people on your staff – be they young or old – are world-class.”

— Ben Horowitz

124. “You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.”

— Ben Horowitz

125. “I guess I did it because I knew what desperation felt like.”

— Ben Horowitz

126. “Trust me.” That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.”

— Ben Horowitz

127. “Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.”

— Ben Horowitz

128. “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.”

— Ben Horowitz

129. “A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.”

— Ben Horowitz

130. “If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, you may also get knocked cold.”

— Ben Horowitz

131. “I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense.”

— Ben Horowitz

132. “Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.”

— Ben Horowitz

133. “Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself.”

— Ben Horowitz

134. “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.”

— Ben Horowitz

135. “Within seven months of founding, we’d already booked $10 million in contracts. Loudcloud was taking off, but we were in a race against time and the competition. This meant hiring the best people and fielding the broadest cloud service, and that meant spending money – lots of it.”

— Ben Horowitz

136. “Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while.”

— Ben Horowitz

137. “It’s important to point out to the executive that when a company doubles in size, she has a new job. This means that doing the things that made her successful in her old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the number-one way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job.”

— Ben Horowitz

138. “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