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

Posted on 13 February 2019 by Ben Horowitz

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, includingdemoting 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. Free Read [ The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers ] By [ Ben Horowitz ] For Kindle ePUB or eBook – kino-fada.fr Executive Summary This is a book about Ben Horowitz s war stories Ben Horowitz has good war stories, if you care about the narrow space of Venture Backed fast growth technology startups I m not so sure that they generalize to the point of making a good management guide You might be better off reading some Drucker.First the absolute preliminaries Ben Horowitz co founded LoudCloud with Marc Andreessen in 1999, with a plan to do enterprise managed services what has now grown to the SaaS and Executive Summary This is a book about Ben Horowitz s war stories Ben Horowitz has good war stories, if you care about the narrow space of Venture Backed fast growth technology startups I m not so sure that they generalize to the point of making a good manag...This is one of the best books you ll ever read on entrepreneurship and being a CEO.If you are a CEO, read this book.If you aspire to be a CEO read this book.If you are on a management team and want to understand what a CEO goes through, read this book.If you are interested in entrepreneurship and want to understand it better, read this book.On Friday, I spent the entire day with about 50 of the CEOs of companies we are investors in Rand Fishkin of Moz put together a full day Foundry Group CEO This is one of the best books you ll ever read on entrepreneurship and being a CEO.If you are a CEO, read this book.If you aspire to be a CEO read this book.If you are on a management team and want to understand what a CEO goes through, read this book.If you are interested in entrepreneurship and want to understand it better, read this book.On Friday...I haven t read many any books that are written by CEO s for CEO s If you are a CEO, aspire to be a CEO, or really, manage anyone you need to read this book This quote is perhaps my favorite one from the book At the top, nobody is there to tell you what to do It s easy to look at some leaders and wonder how they knew what to do to become so successful Are they just really smart The truth is that they likely did what everyone else in that situation has to do get scrappy and just I haven t read many any books that are written by CEO s for CEO s If you are a CEO, aspire to be a CEO, or really, manage anyone you need to read this book This quote is perhaps my favorite one from the book At the top, nobody is there to tell you what to do It s easy to look at some leaders and wonder how they knew what to do to become so successful Are they just really smart The truth is that they likely did what everyone else in that situation has to do get scrappy and just figure it out and don t give up Great CEOs face the pain They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems calls the torture Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self congratulatory explanations...If you got advice from someone you found really annoying even if it was good advice from an interesting perspective would you be able to get over how annoying the person talking your ear off is That s basically where I am with this book I think his advice is really interesting, and it s clear that a lot of the lessons he s learned throughout the course of his career were earned with blood and sweat, but ultimately, I m not sure I can get past how annoying I found the voice he was writing If you got advice fr...This is the very best business book I have ever read.I would estimate that I ve read roughly 1,000 I ve loved maybe 100 This one is in it s own category, a book that both documents the times about 12 15 years ago and paints a picture of what we can do today.I cannot recommend it highly enough, and I cannot saystrongly read it If you know me email me at my personal address and I ll buy it for you There are a few things that happen to an entrepreneur I ve faced down the belly of the This is the very best business book I have ever read.I would estimate that I ve read roughly 1,000 I ve loved maybe 100 This one is in it s own category, a book that both documents the times about 12 15 years ago and paints a picture of what we can do today.I cannot recommend it high...This is not a book that I think many general readers would enjoy The first part is about the author s experiences building and running various tech companies and is fairly interesting Most of it, though, is a huge compendium of short bits of management advice that gets very tedious It might be of interest if I were looking for a how to book, but, even so, it seems to be based pretty heavily on the author s own experience, i.e., I did this I was successful Ergo, this is the right thing to This is not a book that I think many general readers would enjoy The first part is about the author s experiences building and running various tech companies and is fairly interesting Most of it, though, is a huge compendium of short bits of management advice that gets very tedious It might be of interest if I were looking for a how to book, but, even so, it seems ...It s hard for me give this a rating, as I haven t really read many other how to business books I liked the narrative section at the beginning of the book a bit better than the tactical advice section, but I think that s probably just how I prefer to get information There are some great lessons in here for non CEOs, but I suspect it s evenvaluable for those who have founded and or run a company I think most relevant and or interesting to me were Hiring for strength rather than lack of It s hard for me give this a rating, as I haven t really read many other how to business books I liked the narrative section at the beginning of the book a bit better than the tactical advice section, but I think that s probably just how I prefer to get information There are some great lessons in here for non CEOs, but I suspect it s evenvaluable for those who have founded and or run a company I think most relevant and or interesting to me were Hiring for strength rather than lack of weakness If you re bringing someone new onto the team, really think hard about what strengths are most important for the job and find so... If one of your executives becomes a big jerk dog, you have to send her to the pound Woof Pun intended This was nothing like I expected, and not in a particularly good way The subtitle Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers led me to believe this would be a useful book for a budding entrepreneur, but the term building is rather misleading This covers a great deal of already very established business issues in great detail, such as hiring and firing executives, designing If one of your executives becomes a big jerk dog, you have to send her to the pound Woof Pun intended This was nothing like I expected, and not in a particularly good way The subtitle Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers led me to believe this would be a useful book for a budding entrepreneur, but the term bu...Ben Horowitz joined Netscape in the very early days and proceeded to ride the internet wave all the way up, all the way down, and everywhere in between over the course of his career In this memoir business advice book, he recounts choice moments from his extensive career and shares information he found important along the way.In a world filled with Rah Rah You Can Do It business books, I found the tone of this book incredibly refreshing The opening paragraph gets right to the...I can t take insights from someone who has so little insight about himself Cases in point As a white boy, you do not have to call yourself the Jackie Robinson of barbecue You can just say you are good at barbecuing Or say nothing, really because it s irrelevant That fact that your grandfather once WENT to a black neighborhood is not a story Seriously you should not tell people that, because IT S NOT A STORY The fact that you bullied your wife into going on her first date with you, is I can t take insights from someone who has so little insight about himself Cases in point As a white boy, you do not have to call yourself the Jackie Robinson...

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

English
13 February 2019

Ben Horowitz