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The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Hardcover – March 4, 2014
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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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Business
- Publication dateMarch 4, 2014
- Dimensions6 x 1.01 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100062273205
- ISBN-13978-0062273208
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Editorial Reviews
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“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
“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
“There is more than enough substance in Mr. Horowitz’s impressive tome to turn it into a leadership classic.” — The Economist
From the Back Cover
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.
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Business (March 4, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062273205
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062273208
- Item Weight : 1.01 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.01 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #38 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #65 in Business Management (Books)
- #99 in Leadership & Motivation
- Customer Reviews:
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 10 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.
Follow him on Twitter @bhorowitz and his blog, www.bhorowitz.com.
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Entrepreneurial Thinking Definition
Ben Horowitz is a great entrepreneur according to my definition. Throughout his book his demonstrates (1) self-awareness and (2) creativity, and (3) how he put these into action.
Firstly, self-awareness. In the first chapter, “From Communist to Venture Capitalist” he explains who he is, where he comes from, and what he knows. He explains that “being scared doesn’t mean [being] gutless.” Having enough confidence in yourself to be bold is a key aspect of entrepreneurship; he displayed a great deal of boldness when he bought tangram to secure business with EDS. Then, Ben continues to tell us about his communist background, and how that is an advantage: “I realized that embracing the unusual parts of my background would be the key to making it through. It would be those things that I would bring to the table that nobody else had.” Lastly, he explains his mindset in terms of the following four criteria, which helped him immensely throughout his career: (1) to separate facts from perspective, (2) to “turn your s*** in” which means to be responsible for yourself and your work, (3) to not rely on first impressions, especially those based on appearances, and (4) to “look at the world through priorities.” It is therefore clear from chapter 1 that Ben Horowitz knows himself very well, and because he does, he is both confident and prepared to push himself to the limit.
Secondly, creativity. There are many examples of creativity in the book, but I’ll point to one in particular that shows rigorous creativity. After LoudCloud achieved a period of stability, most CEOs would try to remain in that state, but Ben thought differently. He asked himself, “What are we [LoudCloud] not doing?” The answer was well fought, but it eventually came out: they are not being a software company. And so, Ben rigorously devised a plan to save his and his employee’s careers. After selling LoudCloud, he would start a software company called Opsware and focus on systems automatization. To come up with this decision shows how creativity may be the answer to a struggle. Sometimes it is better to think of alternative solutions than just going forward or backwards, and this is exactly what Ben demonstrates time after time in his book – of course, assuming that everything he says he did is true.
Lastly, action. At this point I am sure that you have noticed that Ben is a man of action – whenever he says something he immediate acts upon it – but I’ll elaborate to further prove this. To save LoudCloud from going bankrupt, he only had two months to resolve his company’s problems in order to save business with his biggest client, EDS. He did, and on top of that was also able to start a group of ten engineers on a project named “Oxide,” whose goal was to separate the opsware software from LoudCloud. Ben did all of this in the 2 months period he was given, meaning that he – and his company – did not wasting any time. Ben asked his employees to come at 8am and leave at 10pm everyday (of course he also stayed those hours). He made sure that everyone worked diligently when they had to “turn their s*** in.” They accumulated enough momentum during the beginning of the 2-month rally to carry them throughout. So when the time ran out, Ben had successfully saved his company and business with EDS. That is why action – and traction – should always be the result of self-awareness and creativity.
Effectual Reasoning
Effectual reasoning has three main principles: the (1) bird in the hand, which means understanding the resources that you have at your disposal, (2) crazy quilt, which means building from the bottom up with an end goal in mind, and (3) pilot in the plane, which means that you want to be in control but not always have all the information. In his book, Ben doesn’t talk explicitly about these principles, but he definitely demonstrates them.
(1) Bird in the Hand. Ben went to college during the computer boom in Silicon Valley. When and where he studied (the resources) provided him a key advantage over other competitors because he had the knowledge to tap into a market that was underdeveloped and growing exponentially. Moreover, he understood that that point in time would also produce people of likeminded prospective. And so, Ben was able to team up with exceptional individuals such as Marc Andreessen (smartest person, according to Ben), Scott Kupor (director of finance), Mark Cranney (head of sales), Shannon Callahan (head of recruiting and HR), Margit Wennmachers (sultan of networking), and Frank Chen (head of product management) to name a few. This is how Ben demonstrates using the resources available to him.
(2) Crazy quilt. Ben’s end goal was to become a successful CEO, but he didn’t know how to get there. And so, he did what any other person would do in his situation: take a step forward and see where that leads him. His first step was to quit his old job and work for Marc Andreessen at Netscape. Circumstances and other people’s involvement lead him to take another step: build Loudcloud with Marc Andreessen. Interesting to note here is that if Ben had not quit his first job, he would not have met Marc Andreeseen and therefore not been able to build LoudCloud. Also, had Marc Andresseen not employed Ben, he would not have recognized Ben’s potential. Again, involvement from other people and circumstances then lead to Ben’s third step: selling LoudCloud and creating Opsware. As you probably guessed, other involvement from other people and circumstances lead to the next step: selling Opsware to HP and creating a venture capital firm with Marc Andreessen. And so, understanding that there are infinite ways of reaching your end goal is important, because it enables you to be flexible with ideas that come along the way. Flexibility to allow other people’s input, and to take advantage of opportunities that you hadn't foreseen. Ben demonstrates this in his journey to become a CEO, and to be honest, he became quite proficient at it.
(3) Pilot in the plane. Suffice it to say that Ben delegated work to the executives of his companies, but he always partnered with Marc Andreessen because he knew that Marc Andreessen set of skills complemented his: Marc Andreessen was the public face of the company because he thrived in that environment; Ben stayed in the background managing the company. He then goes to explain that the most important asset of a company is its employees. In light of the-pilot-in-the-plane principle, it makes a lot of sense that you keep your employees motivated because you will distribute the workload to them. Specifically in chapters 5 and 6, Ben explains the importance of taking care of the people, and creating the right in of culture in your company. The reason why the first priority of a company should be to take care of its people according to him is because they are the most knowledgeable individuals of your company. They know what the problems and strengths are because they do the work; managers, executives and CEOs orchestrate from above and may lack on smaller details. In order to have awareness of those smaller details migrate from the employees to the managers and then executive a great company culture has to be created. A great company culture is one in which workers are encouraged to talk about problems and strengths equally. Where they are awarded and recognized based on merit and not on lobbying skills. Where workers are encouraged to “move fast and break things,” meaning that workers should innovate and strive to cause breakthroughs. In this environment, workers like to go to work because it is interesting and genuinely fun. And when a worker wants to work, he/she is the most valuable asset of a company. That is why Ben knows how to delegate work and responsibility among the different hierarchical levels of his company. In analogy, a plane not only needs a pilot to operate satisfactorily. It also needs a co-pilot, stewardesses, a control tower, engineers, an air marshal, and passengers or else flying a plane is: not possible, not profitable and not safe. Ben knows this.
Stewardess Principle
This principle states that workers are individuals and for that reasons they must be encouraged to use their skills for the better of the company. Just like effectual reasoning has several components to it, so does the Stewardess Principle. Several of the key dimensions of the Stewardess Principle that I wish to discuss are: (1) culture, (2) motivation, and (3) power distance. Ben applies these dimensions to his company, and the result is obvious.
(1) Culture. Suffice it to say that Ben dedicates an entire chapter of his book to discuss how important it is to create the right culture in your company. Specifically, one has to minimize politics, encourage the right kind of ambition, and continuously have one-on-ones. By doing this, a company encourages and ensures that its workers have the right work ethics.
By minimizing politics (which means lobbying in order to achieve promotions or benefits) one reinforces the notion that if an employee works hard he/she will be rewarded accordingly. But most importantly, working hard becomes the only way to move up the ladder. No slacker will be able to lobby his/her way to the top. As a result, workers will not feel treated unjustly.
By encouraging the right kind of ambition, one avoids individual agendas or people trying to gain success at the expense of the company. The right kind of ambition is when a worker genuinely wants the company to succeed, and if the company succeeds he/she succeeds with it. The wrong kind of ambition, by contrast, is when a worker wants to succeed regardless of the company’s success. The way to encourage the right kind of ambition, according to Ben, is to seek out those employees with the wrong kind of ambition and fire them before they can rot others, and to screen possible employers while interviewing.
By establishing one-on-ones workers are able to voice any issues to their managers. According to Ben, during one-on-ones managers should do 10% talking and 90% listening. The main point of a one-on-one is for the worker to voice his thoughts and his concerns. This way if there are any problems in the company, the managers become aware of them and may pass the information along to executives and ultimately the CEO.
(2) Motivation. Motivation follows a well-established culture. If Ben had not established an excellent culture in his company he would not haven been able to ask his workers to come to work from 8am to 10pm for months at a time. As if that was not enough, Ben asked this of his workers on three consecutive occasions. This is evidence of what well-motivated stewards are capable of doing.
(3) Power distance. This dimension explains that because companies are hierarchical systems there is a potential for people to use power to abuse their subordinates. To prevent this from happening in his company, Ben placed top priority on one-on-ones. He almost fired one of his executives because he didn't do his one-on-ones. The point of one-on-ones is mentioned above, but they also an additional psychological effect. When managers listen to works, it shifts the power balance for the duration of the one-on-one. As a result, workers feel that the power distance is bridged, allowing them to work more closely with managers. And that is highly desirable.
And so, this is how Ben Horowitz exemplifies what a successful entrepreneur and CEO is. His self-awareness and creativity (and a few other personal traits) took him all the way to where he stands: co-founder of the Andreessen Horowitez venture capital firm valued at $4 billion.
As the song begins, with Eminem talking over an army drill cadence: "Cause sometimes you just feel tired, feel weak... and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up... but you got to search within you, and try to find the inner strength... and just pull that s-- out of you... and get that motivation to not give up, and not be a quitter... no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face, and collapse..."
It's the ultimate theme song (if you like rap) for Horowitz' time as CEO of Loudcloud and later Opsware, going through hell - and being forged into steel via incredible trials by fire - along the hard, bloody road to success (seeing Opsware acquired for $1.6 billion). Pulling out the incredibly important lessons from that experience is the purpose of the book.
In another section, Horowitz distinguishes between okay CEOs and great CEOs by pointing out a difference in perspective on how they made it through killer trials. When Horowitz would ask fellow CEOs "how did you do it," as in "How did you survive that brutal gauntlet," okay CEOs would point to something specific. Whereas the great CEOs would simply boil it down to a simple hardcore essence: "I never quit."
They simply refused to give in or give out, as the "Till I Collapse" chorus puts it:
Til the roof comes off, til the lights go out
Til my legs give out, can't shut my mouth
Til the smoke clears out, am I high perhaps
I'm a rip this s--, til my bone collapse...
You must know what this means, on a deep level, to be a great CEO. And the same goes for traders. Nearly all traders, like nearly all CEOs, face their "time in the wilderness" - when nothing feels easy, everything feels impossible, and killer challenges press on every side.
I devoured "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" in less than 24 hours, having heard about it via youtube interview of Horowitz at a tech startup conference. The sense of realness - of someone who has been down in the mud and the blood and fought their way through - was absolutely compelling.
This book - basically a series of guidelines for CEOs and building a business - is not some fluffy management tome written by a theoretical management consultant with no personal concept of what brutally hard decisions are like. This is front-line reporting from a CEO who has gone to war... taken severe casualties... made series after series of life-or-death decisions... motivated troops in the trenches... and ultimately won. (As such, the book will almost certainly offend or turn off those with a more 'civilized', and less emotionally raw, perspective on what company leadership.)
The book had triple resonance for me on three fronts: Entrepreneur, CEO, and Trader. The "building a business" aspect spoke directly to our plans: Mercenary Trader, our financial publishing and trading education startup built on founder sweat equity, is on the cusp of critical mass after four-plus years of blood, sweat and tears. Our model is built around cultivating a true community of traders - monetizing the research we use to trade and invest our own funds (and those of clients), while educating members in our community (in a way that no one else does) that they might join us, share trading and investing ideas, and take their own trading to greater than ever heights.
In terms of hardcore challenges, we have already had to deal with questions like whether to sell a major piece of the business... how to handle joint venture projects (including a major software initiative) gone south... the bloody business of firing people (of course)... and lots of other things, all while managing capital simultaneously.
Ultimately we want to provide seed capital to the breakthrough star traders in our community, having trained them and equipped them with shared community resources - our own version of Julian Robertson's "Tiger Cubs" - and use flowback from publishing profits to further deepen and expand our research capabilities, even while creating a shared idea environment that fosters partnerships and even life-long friendships. Think hedge fund incubator crossed with "trader greatness training" and deep community value-add.
Not unlike what a great Silicon Valley firm cultivates for tech founders (and hence the tie-in to this review)... the VC model of A16Z (Horowitz' and Andreessen's firm) was compelling in this regard too, in the way they took a bunch of long-standing VC industry conventions and simply decided to blow them up.
(I found it hilarious, as an aside, that the historical reason VCs are extremely private, and totally disdainful of publicity, is because this is how the original banking houses did it, like the Rothschilds and whatnot - those guys were publicity-shy because they so often funded both sides of a war.)
For the longest time, as Horowitz makes clear, VCs assumed that tech founders needed "adult supervision." Even worse, they would sometimes try to eyeball a founder to decide if they were "CEO material" based on appearance and superficial impressions, not unlike the worst practices of the redneck talent scouts in "Moneyball" pre-Billy Beane. One almost imagines choosing a candidate to lead an organization simply because he (or she) looks a little better in a tailored suit - which is apparently what actually happens, given an utter lack of substantive process.
Horowitz and Andreessen, in contrast, realized that great tech CEOs are MADE, not born - shaped and created via community experience and support - and that all the truly great tech companies were led to greatness by the passionate founders who created them in the first place (Jobs, Gates, Hewlett and Packard etc).
They thought tech founders would likely be in synch with a vision of empowering founders, rather than expecting to hand their passionate idea over to an empty suit... and they were right. So they set up A16Z, a different kind of VC firm, to facilitate that transition: "Making" the CEO out of the founder, or rather helping the founder to come into his own as CEO, through guidance and support.
This view had deep parallels with a great point of frustration, for yours truly, in respect to the trading industry: There are so many books, so much literature, talking about what makes for a "great trader," or what makes someone "trader material," not unlike someone being "CEO material."
But great traders, like great CEOs, are also MADE - it is at least partly an unnatural thing, as Horowitz says - and there is a huge amount of psychological and emotional development along the way. There is training needed for this stuff. And not the same old "cut losses and let profits run" stuff either, but real, deep, meaningful training. Having potential is not the same thing as being developed - not by a long shot.
If you are serious about building a business, becoming a CEO, or stepping up your game as a trader via leadership lessons with strong cross-application to trading, buy this book.
If brutal honesty turns you off and you prefer a rose-colored-glasses view of reality, however, don't buy this book. It pulls no punches, which is fantastic for those with the clear-eyed courage of Thucydides: "The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."
Top reviews from other countries

So perhaps it has some redeeming features, but I'm quite happy not knowing what they are.
The book seems to be a self-congratulatory lap of honour in which the author demonstrates that he is the most non-racist, inclusivistic, non-judgmental person who has ever lived. He bludgeons us through the taxonomies of his various sets of friends, almost all of whom have some claim or other to minorityship which he just *has* to mention, whilst systematically pick-axing his prose to death with the Cultural Marxist "she" when what he means is "he" (or – if you must – "they"). It's just irritating.
I have never met this man. But I have met enough people like him to know that I don't want to hear any more of what he has to say about himself.
I'm happy for him that he manages to fire his friends *and* sleep well at night. I'm happy for him that he loves himself so much he just had to write an entire book about what a fabulous fellow he is. The problem is that I simply don't feel that anyone who is as eager as he is to cram his credentials of conventionality down my throat by endorsing every single point of what happens to be Politically Correct this week can genuinely have any balls.
Ergo, he isn't a leader.
Ergo, this isn't what it claims to be: a book about leadership.

1 - Almost all the advice provided here is for C-Suite, or perhaps exclusively CEO. Corporate boardroom, shareholders, directors bonuses, right person for the right job... I found it fascinating to read about things like the personality qualities the author looks for or assumes in a CEO fit, but I feel for a lot of people this information will simply not be applicable to their day to day. Certainly there wasn't much I could draw into my day to day.
2- The books referred to throughout by the author, by the likes of Andy Grove and Peter Thiel, are in my opinion far more useful - more game-changing insights
Maybe it's just because I'm not a C-suite director or a business founder that I can't appreciate the value of the advice... certainly I appreciate the honesty of the author and their willingness to call out what they see as corporate BS, but I found myself putting it down at 50%, 70%, 80%, picking up later, forging on, and still not feeling I was getting much from the read.

A dozen sentences and ideas can be extrapolated as good advice and mulled over. The rest is self indulging praise and over the top specific and unaccessible abstraction.
As a business owner I found the narrative similar to giving a Bugatti owner manual to a Civic driver and tell him to use it and improve his experience of the car.

1. I recently met an ex-colleague, whose founded and runs a business now valued over a couple of billion dollars. He like the author said that we just kept on going through tough times. As Winston Churchill also said, when in hell keep going. And as the author says, if you play long enough, you may get lucky.
2. Focus on exploiting your strengths more than in ensuring that there are no weaknesses
3. Sometimes the things that you are not doing should be the things that you should be doing.
4. Looking at worlds from different prisms, helps separate facts from perception or shall we say fiction.
5. In war time, just play to survive, kill and win i.e., know what needs to be done and focus on getting it done. Alignment of all with the strategy and tactics is very important.
6. If you are a thinker, get people who can get things done. My father used to say that most executive often knew how to get things done, however if they also knew what to do, then they would be more effective.
7. In business if you need to find an answer, you got to find it irrespective of odds of finding it.
8. Importance of training your people and integrating them. As i was old over a quarter of a century ago in an interview, you need to train your staff from day one.
There are of course other lessons too, like when should you sell your company, how should organisation culture be deigned, how should a founder deal with simple things like title or avoid the organisation becoming political, etc. I am sure, depending on where you are and what your challenges are, you will have a different take.
A good book to read for entreprenuers, for people charting their own courses. I give it my highest recommendation.

Hi Sam - I have been meaning to tell you but we have not 'bumped' into each other recently. Thank you for your book recommendation of 'The Hard Thing about the Hard Things'.
Ben Horowitz managed to navigate and articulate what can be a very complicated world so well and a lot of what he said resonated with me.
One of many highlights was:
FINAL POINT
"In the technology business, you rarely know everything up front. The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important."
So, thank you!