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

by Ben Horowitz

I do not attempt to present a formula in this book. Instead, I present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO, and now as a venture capitalist, I still find these lessons useful—especially as I work with a new generation of founder-CEOs. Building a company inevitably leads to tough times. I’ve been there; I’ve done that. Circumstances may differ, but the deeper patterns and the lessons keep resonating.

she was patient, willing to wait until I got comfortable with the world, no matter how long it took.

I notice how many entrepreneurs had strong mothers.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

“I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.” —JAY Z, “ON TO THE NEXT ONE”

Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

Good product managers send their status reports in on time every week, because they are disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send in their status reports on time, because they don’t value discipline.

He uses the word "discipline" but I really think he's getting at consistency. People who are serious about management (any kind really) are at the core attentive to the power of habits and consistency. It's not about the one time you do an awesome thing but the great stuff you can do consistently. As habit.

For example, consider the word ‘cupcakes.’ It’s fine for me to say to Shannon, ‘Those cupcakes you baked look delicious.’ But it is not okay for me to say to Anthony, ‘Hey, Cupcakes, you look mighty fine in them jeans.’ ”

The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area.

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.

Tenacity and tolerance for discomfort. It's what separates the good from best.

The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, salespeople, and finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.

“Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not in there, they do not exist. I can relate to what they’re going through, but I cannot tell them what to do. I can only help them find it in themselves. And sometimes they can find peace where I could not.