Ben Horowitz

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.

Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Piet Terheyden

Guillaume Gelin

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing.

The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

Ideally, a culture design point will be trivial to implement but have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior.

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational design are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts.

When should you start implementing processes? While that varies depending on your situation, keep in mind that it's much easier to add new people to old processes than new processes to old people.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things quotes

Join the club