Top 120 Ben Horowitz Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— 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. “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

112. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “Unrelenting confidence was necessary.”

— Ben Horowitz

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

— Ben Horowitz

137. “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

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

— Ben Horowitz