Ben Horowitz on Leadership Quotes

"Scaling a business is not a linear process. It's a series of step functions where everything that worked before stops working."

"If you don't have a culture of excellence, you will have a culture of mediocrity by default."

"The hardest thing is not the technical challenge; it's the human challenge of keeping people moving."

"Wartime CEO violates protocol but captures the mountain. Peacetime CEO follows protocol to win the war."

"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 army: if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard."

"True culture is defined by how your people act when the leader is not in the room."

"Wartime CEOs do not have time for consensus."

"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."

"The vision of the company is defined by the quality of the people you recruit to build it."

"Hiring for lack of weakness is a mistake; you must hire for strength."

"If you don't have a culture that supports innovation, your strategy won't matter."

"Culture isn't just a set of values; it's the creative solution to the problem of human behavior at scale."

"In wartime, the company is fighting for its life, and the CEO must prioritize survival above all else."

"In wartime, you don't have the luxury of consensus. You need a clear plan and the authority to execute it quickly."

"If you want people to behave a certain way, you have to create a habit for it."

"There is no such thing as a perfect CEO."

"The most important thing a leader can do is transfer their belief to the rest of the organization."

"A CEO's confidence is infectious; so is their doubt."

"Wartime CEOs must have a vision that is focused on survival and winning, leaving no room for consensus."

"Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, they sweat when they are cold, and they don't quit."

"If you don't communicate the 'why', you won't get the 'what' done correctly."

"If you can't be honest about the risks, you can't be trusted with the rewards."

"If your vision doesn't include how you will treat your people during the hard times, it's incomplete."

"Culture is not a set of values; it is the priority of behaviors you reward."

"The first thing that I would say to any CEO is that you have to have a process for how you run the company."

"Leadership is the art of getting people to do what they don't want to do to achieve what they want to achieve."

"Culture is how your employees decide to solve the problems you didn’t tell them how to solve."

"As a CEO, I found that 90 percent of my time was spent on things that were not going well."

"The hard thing is telling people the truth when the truth is bad."

"Great CEOs have the ability to focus on the one thing that matters when everything is going wrong."

"Culture is the shadow of the leader's vision cast across the entire organization."

"A culture of excellence is built on a foundation of trust and accountability."

"You have to be able to tell a story that people want to be a part of."