Ben Horowitz on what makes the job of a startup CEO so difficult

“The way to think about [the CEO job] is: You invent something the world may want, so you start a company. You hire every person you know who you think is good and respect. You raise money from people. You go sign up customers, and those customers depend on you to succeed. It’s a lot of pressure. But you don’t actually know what you’re doing. You’ve never been a CEO. You’ve never run a big organization.”

Ben continues:

“You know everyone’s depending on you. And all you do is work, so you don’t have any life outside of this, and your life is basically over if this company fails. And you don’t know [if your decisions] are the right thing to do — you only think it. And then you have people around you telling you, ‘No, it’s not the right thing to do.’ So how do you trust your eyes and trust what you think, then go do it? It’s a very difficult problem.”

“This is where I see CEOs fail all the time,” Ben says. They think they know what the right thing to do is, but they don’t act on it. They hesitate because there’s “too much scary stuff” between you and making that decision (e.g. the pressure of it all, people telling you you’re wrong, etc.).

Full video: a16z “Ben Horowitz on Leadership and Culture“ (Apr 2025)