
Kindle | The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers |
By | |
ISBN | 0062273205 |
ISBN-13 | 9780062273208 |
Publication | 14 May 2025 |
Number of Pages | 304 |
Format Type | Hardcover |
Awards | Financial Times Business Book of the Year Longlist (2014), Goodreads Choice Award Business Books (2014) |
The hard thing about hard things book review
And what a great mentor Bill Campbell is to people like Jeff Bezos Then at the end of the book he introduces one of the chapters by sharing that Bill Campbell told him he Ben was the best CEO he s ever worked with Nice He uses rap lyrics from the Trinidad James All Gold Everything song to make a really relevant tie in to the topic he s discussing because he likes the lyrics I guess But I really want to take advice from someone who will take a break from bragging about shit to drop some Trinidad James That really makes me feel like this guy s not just any CEO He s a cool CEO He is one of those people who reads The Art of War and tries too hard to apply it to business situations Isn t it cool that he curses at work Btw profanity can be great when used on purpose by a CEO to make a point Btw profanity can be great when used on purpose by a CEO to make a point Btw profanity can be great when used on purpose by a CEO to make a point Fuck Sorry That s about how many times in the book he makes this point Even though he s supposedly a Kingkiller and done all this other cool shit.
The hard thing about hard things table of contents
And the then balance of the session 75 minutes was the entire group spending between 5 and 15 minutes on each topic. The hard thing about hard things book It was awesome We finished with a fun dinner at Pizzeria Locale I drove home with my mind buzzing and arrived around 8pm to see Amy laying on the coach reading a book So I grabbed by iPad and looked to see what was new on it. The hard thing about hard things mark cranney Ben thanks for writing this and putting 100% of your heart into it English I haven t read many any books that are written by CEO s for CEO s If you are a CEO.
The hard thing about hard things review
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 firms 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. Nonfiction the hard thing about hard things review 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 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. The hard thing about hard things review 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. Hard things about hard things pdf free 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. The hard thing about hard things apple books 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. The hard thing about hard things nonfiction book 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 The Hard Thing About Hard Things Building a Business When There Are No Easy AnswersIf 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 in He sets up the most epic humblebrag ever first by talking about this Bill Campbell guy and how awesome he is by the end of the first book Kvothe has done basically nothing. The hard thing about hard things review Okay I m drinking too much haterade and all the books I don t like are blurring together I m cutting myself off English 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. The hard thing about hard things book in hindi pdf 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 IaaS space They were technological pioneers in that space They weathered the dot com bubble burst but it was touch and go since most of their clients were other tech firms going bankrupt They IPOd in a post bubble environment with a declining market They pivoted to become Opsware a tech services firm i. The hard thing about hard things nonfiction review e further up in the backend of the managed services stack They pivoted as a public corporation close to bankruptcy which is a nightmare I wouldn t wish on my worst enemies They weathered NASDAQ delisting threats mass employee revolts the whole Mad Max scenario So he offers the prospect of excellent data from the inside Ben also has a reputation in the valley as a no bullshit guy so this is valuableSecond some initial thoughts To the extent that Ben s stories will generalize they only apply to fast growth venture backed tech startups that plan to IPO It bears repeating that this is but one subset of the technology space the subset that gets a disproportionately large amount of press coverage and fanfare So much of the lessons are the kind that you ve probably already osmosed from the Paul Graham Peter Thiel A360Z AVC crowd And if you haven t then you should probably start with Paul Graham and Peter Thiel rather than jumping into this book which has a narrower scope and doesn t make much effort to make clear the context That s okay since it s aimed at the specific crowd but just be aware if you re not of that crowd and thinking of reading this book. The hard thing about hard things audible Ben tells the story from the technical CEO perspective which is a fairly rare perspective to get given the depth of Ben s experience Note that Paul Graham only walked the walk through a 50 million dollar acquisition and never faced the challenges of being the CEO of a publicly traded corporation Peter Thiel did but is ultimately a non technical founder Besides the PayPal mafia is fairly cagey about the war stories around PayPal given the extent of the internal fights e. The hardest part about learning hard things C perspective and lack founder experience Thus this book does give us an opportunity to read the thoughts of a founder CEO all the way through and beyond the IPO stage But it is by no means a masterpiece that stands alone It does offer an incremental view if you are primarily interested in the narrow niche of venture backed startups and serves as a 4 star or 5 star book of anecdotes that have potentially generalizable lessons if read critically while fully aware of the appropriate broader context That s a big asterisk though So I will attempt to summarize the core lessons that I personally got out of the books given that I am not solely interested in this space 1 Being CEO in a fast growth venture startup requires learning at an incredible pace The job description changes almost completely within 6 months given the growth rate There isn t any way to get that experience except networking with founders who have previous lived experience as founder CEOs of large companies This is why for example Zuckerberg had long walks with Jobs A top notch VC firm will definitely help you get that which is why they are so valuable The rotating board circuit in the top Silicon Valley firms will provide this if you can get them to sit on your board Horowitz for example holds Bill Campbell s advice in particularly high esteem You probably can t unless Sequioa Founders Fund Andreessen Horowitz or KPCB is backing you. The hard thing about hard things author 3 To Ben s credit he does focus on good management but mostly doesn t add anything new to the corpus It s mostly the usual good stuff don t do arbitrary things don t publicly shame people don t let people get away with enriching themselves at the company s expense through strong arming don t do short term things that jeopardize the long term and if you do it will rapidly become the culture and will remain permanently broken Again a decent coverage of the standard MBA literature covers this space better. The hard thing about hard things building a business 4 Being CEO is a lonely job You cannot expect your executive team to understand all your decisions given their limited scope You also cannot spend the time to give them the broader scope all the time since that takes away from doing their own jobs But if you don t they might stop trusting you It s Catch 22s all the way down. Hard things about hard things pdf free 5 In addition while the CEO mentor network can help with your emotions they can t help you with the decisions since it will take them weeks to get up to speed on the context You re really on your own on these decisions. The hard thing about hard things audiobook free 6 It s also emotionally harder when your final decision is 55 45 and you re facing opposition from underlings your board that is 90 10 the other way but lack the appropriate context So you re on the fence leaning one way but others are convinced that you re wrong At this point you should just learn to trust yourself since you re the only one with the appropriate context Your board should be experienced than you so they should be aware of this information asymmetry Consequentially they ll usually just rubberstamp what you decide anyway This doesn t make the decisions any easier to make. Hard things about hard things pdf free 7 You absolutely need to develop decision making processes that are insulated from your own emotional rollercoaster insecurity Ben likes writing things down until the words are convincing on their own I do too Whatever your methods are you will absolutely need to rely on them since you re going to be alone in the decision making processes and need some check to make sure you re operating logically with no emotional biases So develop those early I personally recommend the LessWrong corpus but you might find that too kooky Your choice 8 Ben Horowitz really likes rap and hiphop That s not my thing but whatever I can respect his artistic side Anyone who criticizes him for that aspect of his personality is really missing the point. The hard thing about hard things book Context that Ben Horowitz did not mention that I think would have greatly improved the book 1 The tides are turning and the days when Venture Capitalists could oust founder CEOs and replace them with adults are permanently gone Zuckerberg and the fact that founders like Horowitz and Thiel now lead top Valley VC firms has permanently changed the landscape So a lot of the fighting that Ben had to do and the perpetual underconfidence that he did it with won t apply to future founder CEOs This book adds to the growing corpus that helps make your case to not be ousted which partially obsoletes that aspect of lessons in the book Ironic I know. The hard thing about hard things layoffs 2 Fast growth tech startups that have a distinctive tech advantage can win despite terribly dysfunctional management When you re in a greenfield technology space you can do whatever you want and still win just from the tech advantage For example Valve gets cited a lot for it s no management structure but they sit on a giant money spigot called Steam that just prints money If I also owned such an oil derrick I could probably get away with mandatory sex parties every Thursday This doesn t make the case for workplace orgies. Hard things about hard things pdf free 65 billion dollars But there is not a single mention of how OpsWare fared post acquisition For all I know and given the next point I suspect this was a shitty deal for HP. The hard thing about hard things total pages 4 It doesn t help that Ben Horowitz heavily raided the OpsWare executive team to form the core team at his next venture the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz That can t have been good for OpsWare at all. The hardest part about learning hard things 5 Ben talks about how you really need your executive team to hit the ground running You can cover for one executive to get them up to speed but you can t cover for every executive Thus you need to hire top tier talent often from outside This is great But this also forms a good explanation for why top executives often seem to be from a different planet move in completely different circles and get paid orders of magnitude But Ben doesn t cover any of these pathologies or how it really is a necessary side effect of the realities of the executive responsibilities. The hard thing about hard things book price 6 From Ben s raiding of his previous form for top executive talent I get an increasing suspicion that the top talent moves in tight knit teams that gel well together Your management priority should be to network and form these connections from an early stage definitely before you found your own VC backed fast growth startup If you don t have this focus you have to develop it at a late stage in the game and for that you _really_ need top VCs otherwise you will not be plugged in at all and have no access to these folk English This is one of the best books you ll ever read on entrepreneurship and being a CEO. The hard thing about hard things 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 Summit It used a format Rand has used before We broke up into five different groups and has sessions on about ten total topics throughout the day The groups were fluid people were organized by category alpha and beta but then went to the topic they were interested in There was a moderator for each session the first five minutes was each CEO putting up one top of mind issue in the topic 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. The hard thing about hard things table of contents 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 The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers They all say I didn t quit My second favorite quote from the book speaks to one of the greatest challenges all entrepreneurs face work life balance I like to say work hard play hard But sometimes it s easy to forget the play part Or to buy flowers once in a while But the cost of those on your health or relationships can cost much As a company grows communication becomes its biggest challenge If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO then communication will be vastly efficient than if they don t. The hard thing about hard things summary Ben had a lot of great advice on how to hire well especially executives Looking to avoid reactionary big company execs when you need someone who will come in and get stuff done proactively Looking for people who can think on their feet and not make everything a nail for the hammer of their prior experience by asking How will your new job differ from your current one Looking for people who are mission driven and use the team prism instead of the me prism He also had advice about onboarding and training. The hardest part about learning hard things Hiring for strength instead of lack of weakness I ve definitely seen instances of this where a candidate is great in some areas that we really need but isn t great at everything Knowing what you value most is critical here and I fully admit not easy to do. The hard thing about hard things hindi On hiring internally vs externally Internal candidates across often do better which is a great thing to think about when building a team when it comes to CEO succession internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates The core reason is knowledge Knowledge of technology prior decisions culture personnel and tends to be far difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization. The hard thing about hard things book summary One of my favorite sections was Managing strictly by numbers is like painting by numbers No matter how well you instrument your metrics and goals you can ever perfectly encapsulate everything you need your company to be doing Innovation is often like this with many big innovations the team will often struggle to find how it drives value as it doesn t seem to hit the core metric But they can all agree it will improve things I think a big part of the CEO s job is to have a strong product vision and to not compromise on it I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention This usually works well for customer acquisition but not so well for retention Why For many products metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance In contrast the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool As a result many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. The hard thing about hard things review Ben talked about the difference between CEO s who can set direction for a company often founding CEO s and those can can operationally run it as it grows How great CEOs need to be good at both and founding CEOs who don t scale are those who don t learn the operational side And conversely operational CEOs who don t get good at making decisions about direction will fail Ben talked about how Some employees make products some make sales the CEO makes decisions The strength of those decisions is built upon having data Data about what customers think Data about what employees think Data about the metrics A CEO has to be a constant data accumulating machine Another nuance was that a CEO can make a decision at any point in time with the data they have now identify what data would change their mind and seek it out Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to one on ones Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee a customer a partner or an investor. The hard thing about hard things review Ben s stories about Loudcloud and Opsware and the Hard Things he dealt with were impressive I do think they spread too much throughout the book and would have been better concentrated in one part of the book and supplemented by examples from other companies But that doesn t detract from one can learn from them It was strange that he opens each chapter with rap lyrics that often seem very disconnected to the chapter I guess he likes rap but still Pretty cool Ben had Michael Ovitz as an advisor And that he modeled A16Z after CAA where instead of independent agents VCs have a shared network and invest in strategic networks that will help the companies Michael Ovitz on dealmaking Gentlemen I ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process I ve developed a methodology a way of doing things a philosophy if you will Within that philosophy I have certain beliefs I believe in artificial deadlines I believe in playing one against the other I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done. Hard things about hard things pdf free One interesting tendency Ben points out is that When a company starts to lose its major battles the truth often becomes the first casualty You have to be vigilant in looking for the truth and have backbone spot it The reason for this is that humans particularly those who build things only listen to leading indicators of good news Which is so true We can always find reasons to excuse away bad news and reasons to believe good news means than it should Ben closes with a quote I really believe in life is about the journey not the destination So you have to embrace the journey Be so mission driven that the struggles you inevitably face are worth it Life is struggle I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship Embrace the struggle English 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 kind of a story but it doesn t reflect well on you I wish I could get past these things because Horowitz undoubtedly know much about business than I do But no I m out English
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers By Ben Horowitz |
0062273205 |
9780062273208 |
English |
304 |
Hardcover |
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