Name: Timeo Williams's review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Item: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Rating: 5
Author: Timeo Williams

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

A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, including demoting (or firing) a loyal friend; whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them; if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company; how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you; what to do when smart people are bad employees; why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one; whether you should sell your company, and how to do it. Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.

Guillaume Gelin

When I first became a CEO, I genuinely thought that I was the only one struggling. Whenever I spoke to other CEOs, they all seemed like they had everything under control. Their businesses were always going "fantastic" and their experience was inevitably "amazing." I thought that maybe growing up in Berkeley with Communist grand-parents might not have been the best background for running a company. But as I watched my peers' fantastic, amazing businesses go bankrupt and sell for cheap, I realized that I was probably not the only one struggling.

Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don't know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.

There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.

Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: if you don't like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don't become CEO.

Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

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 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.

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

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.

Piet Terheyden

david

Timeo Williams

Packed with actionable advice for any future CEO. Recommend

Horrible. To the point where it feels like there HAS to be some meaningful insight to some of the stories and events that occur, but everything seems to be inconsequential or just resolved by having connections and/or money, or alternatively, someone in their employment who solves the problem and is mentioned in passing.

Joao Neves

Sarah Schumacher

First third is a totally fascinating story of how he got started with his business and how the tech world has progressed as a whole. The rest of it (advice, lessons learned) is must read material for CEOs or entrepreneurs managing people.

Mati Goldberg

Until reading Ben Horowitz's book, 'The Hard Thing About Hard Things,' I knew that he's a successful VC but didn't realize that what made him such was his previous career as a Co-founder and CEO, who struggled hard before his company acquired.

This book is teaching a lot about leadership and taking care of your people. 

"Spend zero time on what you could have done and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company" (p. 92)

“There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid” (p. 207)

Ian Watts

The perfect book for executives, especially CEOs. Gives practical, real-world advice and wisdom hard to come by elsewhere. Fun read as well.

Keven Wang

I would actually recommend reading the new “what you do is who you are”. Ben’s latest book first. Then dive into this one

Santiago Yelmini

The best book on startups I've read so far.

Arturo Hernández

Definitely a must read for everyone that wants to do management at any point in their life. It places specific effort into the job of the CEO, however there’s pure insight for other management and project oriented figures. There’s a lot of use cases that become quite relevant when you are facing those situations. It’s cool to see and know his bio too (prior to the chat).

Dana Kraft

This is a quick read and includes interesting and practical advice. Obviously it's geared more toward the venture-backed software world, but many of Horowitz's suggestions apply to other types of companies as well. While I got a little tired of hearing about Loudcloud, this book is low on the scale of self-promotion relative to most books by CEOs. My favorite advice about dealing with problems is "nobody cares about your problems - just do your job!" His war stories about Loudcloud also remind me of how little you can really know about what's going on inside a company unless you're actually there.

Elizabeth Moore

If you are a CEO, an executive, or a leader; if you aspire to be one of these things; if you simply want to know what goes into making a business a great one, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book. As its title suggest, Ben Horowitz talks about the "hard" parts of surviving the "business of business," not the easy, flashy things that everyone likes to tweet about and pat themselves on the backs for when things are easy. The things Ben Horowitz discusses in this book are what most people would rather avoid, deny, condone, or "work around." 

It is the best business book I've ever read, and it's also an entertaining read as well given that Ben Horowitz is not only smart but also hilarious and as an added bonus he starts all of his chapters with hard core profanity-ridden rap lyrics.

This book opened my eyes to important and sometimes hard-to-swallow business thinking, and it validated a great deal of frustration confusion and more importantly conviction I've held for the last several years about what a strong business should be, what I want in those who lead me and my team, and the kind of leader and thinker I myself want to be. 

Yay, Ben Horowitz!

Chris Raastad

It's been a while. This is a window inside the mind of seasoned investor and CEO Ben Horowitz. I'm pretty sure I picked this up a few months after he made a big investment in TransferWise. What do I remember? In classic Horowitz style, just like his blog posts, he starts every chapter with rap lyrics. I have a feeling the book is a long-form justification for such blog posts such as Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO. It's war stories from his time at a bunch of different companies and leading to the founding of Andreeson Horowitz. Not life-changing, but a good read if you like the guy. (I still don't understand his obsession with rap, but I like Trance probably just as much)
https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime...

Nadine 

Interesting take on management, start- ups entrepreneurship. After reading it I had to check on the date - 2014 because I think a lot of attitudes and management practices have changed and evolved and are far less harsh.

Magdalene Lim

There are people who aspire to be CEOs and there is everyone else.

Does this book teach you how to handle hard things in every situation - the loss of a loved one, a breakup or making an ethical decision - Well, no. It has a more business slant, giving the reader a sense of what a CEO has to go through and make decisions about his/her company.

That said, it is a very readable book. Whether you aspire to be a CEO, someone high up the corporate ladder or just your average Joe or Joelle, it's an interesting book. Just cos' it exposes you to what CEOs go through and to see things from a macro perspective.

4.5*

Ivaylo Durmonski

This book exists to tells us that things are different, hard, unstable, unpredictable, on the other side. On the side of the CEO. If you are a CEO, you should read this book. If your business is not in good shape, you should read this book. If you’re dreaming about becoming a CEO, you should read this book.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is stuffed with examples and tips that aim to help business owners handle critical situations and make a move even when there are seemingly no good moves left to be made.

The book is surely quite different from all the other business books that mostly talk about business plans and meetings. I surely recommend checking it.

As for my personal takeaway from The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it should be about creating an awesome culture in your company. A place where people come to work with joy.

More: https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Lance Willett

Lots of good grist for the mill not just for CEOs but any leader. Feels like a modern take on Andy Grove’s classic High Output Management. Ideas and tips are clear and concise, all based on Ben’s direct experience.

The strategy and the story are the same thing.

The output of a CEO is decision making. Knowing what to do = speed and quality of the CEO’s decisions.

Lance’s takeaways: 

1. Study and listen.
2. Let people know I care and that their voices are heard.
3. Have an opinion on everything.

Aske Dørge

This is the book I wish I read before becoming any sort of manager in a startup.
One of the hard parts about moving from employee to manager, is all the implied expectations: you don't know what you don't know.
Ben tells anecdotes from his point of view when he was a CEO, but then steps out and comments on it from his present self (after having been involved in thousands of companies at YC as an investor/mentor). This combo is incredibly powerful, because the reader often finds themselves being past Ben, not knowing what to do in the anecdote; present Bens then swoops in and lays out all the options and their outcomes, for the reader to learn from.
This is the guide you want to read when you don't know what you're doing.

Daryl Houston

Narcissistic bloviating that at its best occasionally shows glimmers of humanity and at its worst is tone deaf and downright offensive. It's probably somewhat useful if you're a struggling CEO who needs to understand that even people who wind up regarded as successful CEOs struggle through it. It wasn't useful at all to me, and it was a relief to turn the last page. It felt a bit like a vanity publication.

Ilia Markov

This reads a lot like a self-help book for jerks. It seems that the answer to almost any "hard" question or difficulty is to fire people, while other advice includes things like "you have to create a great workplace".

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The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

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