Ben Horowitz’s High-Stakes Leadership Playbook

The hardest part of being a CEO isn't designing the perfect organization or setting flawless objectives; it’s the psychological struggle. It's the feeling you get when you’re staring into the abyss, forced to choose between two horrible options.

This is the world of Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), a venture capital firm with over $46 billion in committed capital, and the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. He has backed market-defining companies from Facebook and Stripe to Airbnb, OpenAI, and Databricks.

Before launching A16Z, Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud, famously taking it public with just $2 million in revenue, an event often called “the IPO from hell”, and later sold it for $1.6 billion. Through near-death startup battles and years of coaching hundreds of CEOs, he forged a management philosophy that defies conventional wisdom, offering hard-earned insights on leadership, scaling, and building enduring companies.

In a recent podcast with Lenny Rachistky , Horowitz distilled the essential mental frameworks required to navigate the pain of leadership, build world-class teams, and understand the current AI landscape.

This isn’t a guide to management techniques, it’s Ben Horowitz’s High-Stakes Leadership Playbook, a map for the psychological gauntlet every leader must run.