The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

by Ben Horowitz

Overview

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.

Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062273208
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/04/2014
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	39,058
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly ten million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Horowitz lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Felicia.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 From Communist to Venture Capitalist 1

Chapter 2 "I Will Survive" 17

Chapter 3 This Time with Feeling 39

Chapter 4 When Things Fall Apart 57

The Struggle 60

CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is 64

The Right Way to Lay People Off 68

Preparing to Fire an Executive 73

Demoting a Loyal Friend 81

Lies That Losers Tell 85

Lead Bullets 88

Nobody Cares 91

Chapter 5 Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits-In that Order 93

A Good Place to Work 99

Why Startups Should Train Their People 105

Is It Okay to Hire People from Your Friend's Company? 114

Why It's. Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies 119

Hiring Executives: If You've Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? 124

When Employees Misinterpret Managers 130

Management Debt 134

Management Quality Assurance 139

Chapter 6 Concerning the Going Concern 143

How to Minimize Politics in Your Company 147

The Right Kind of Ambition 155

Titles and Promotions 159

When Smart People Are Bad Employees 165

Old People 170

One-on-One 176

Programming Your Culture 179

Taking the Mystery Out of Scaling a Company 185

The Scale Anticipation Fallacy 193

Chapter 7 How to Lead Even When You Don't Know Where You are Going 197

The Most Difficult CEO Skill 201

The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage 209

Ones and Twos 214

Follow the Leader 219

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO 224

Making Yourself a CEO 229

How to Evaluate CEOs 235

Chapter 8 First Rule of Entrepreneurship: There are No Rules 243

Solving the Accountability vs. Creativity Paradox 248

The Freaky Friday Management Technique 252

Staying Great 254

Should You Sell Your Company? 257

Chapter 9 The End of the Beginning 265

Appendix: Questions for Head of Enterprise Sales Force 277

Acknowledgments 283

Credits 287

Editorial Reviews

…a lively, candid account of the lessons Horowitz learned in the late 1990s and early 2000s…In an era of downsizing, cost-cutting and stagnant wages, Horowitz's argument and examples are apt and thought-provoking.

The New York Times Book Review - Nancy Koehn

12/23/2013
Horowitz, a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, offers hard-earned business advice and a compendium of the best posts from his popular blog (ben's blog). For the budding tech mogul, this is heady stuff, and politic to heed, as his firm, Andreesen Horowitz, is a nearly $3 billion powerhouse that has invested in winners, including Skype, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and Zynga. But shrewd investing decisions don't make for riveting prose, as Horowitz repeatedly trots out war and military metaphors to describe the struggle to sustain past businesses. Horowitz is far sharper when he's blunt and candid. Admitting that as a CEO he was always scared is far more useful to the aspiring mogul than heading many chapters with hip-hop lyrics describing street corner struggles. Though passages about minimizing office politics and how a startup executive might grow into managing a larger business contain novel insights, most of the useful observations come from citing other titans, including Intel CEO Andy Grove, Intuit head Bill Campbell, and management guru Tony Robbins. This manual reads as a collection of war stories from the 1990s boom-and-bust era blended with platitudes from an older generation of established business leaders. Agent: Amanda Urban. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

More than any other business book released this year, “Hard Things” gives an insider’s perspective on what it’s like to lead and scale a startup.

Business Insider's Best Business Books of 2014

There is more than enough substance in Mr. Horowitz’s impressive tome to turn it into a leadership classic.

The Economist

This is easily one of the essential books every business leader should read if they’re looking for proven and honest management advice.

Entrepreneur's 25 Amazing Business Books from 2014

The most valuable book on startup management hands down

PandoDaily

More than any other business book released this year, “Hard Things” gives an insider’s perspective on what it’s like to lead and scale a startup.” %COMM_CONTRIB%Business Insider's Best Business Books of 2014

Horowitz tends to dispense management advice in a kind of one-two punch. First comes the self-deprecating quip about mismanagement and misery, delivered with a knowing grin and capped with a two-beat chuckle. But soon the smile will vanish, and he’ll turn dead serious. His brow will furrow slightly, his eyes will widen and focus with an intensity that borders on scary, and he’ll speak slowly, deliberately. It’s almost as if you can’t afford not to listen.

Fortune