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

by Ben Horowitz

hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.

If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals,

Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving.

Simply by hearing them out without defending the employee in question, you will send the message that you agree.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition. As a result, managers with the right kind of ambition tend to be radically more valuable than those with the wrong kind.

Why hire a senior person? The short answer is time.

Hiring senior people into a startup is kind of like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs. If all goes well, you will achieve incredible new heights. If all goes wrong, you will start degenerating from the inside out.

Results against objectives Once you’ve set a high standard, it will be straightforward to measure your executive against that standard.

When I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working that will: Distinguish you from competitors Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products Help you identify employees who fit with your mission

Perks are good, but they are not culture.

You will lose ground, but you will prevent your company from descending into chaos.

With this in mind, here are the basic steps to organizational design:

that it’s much easier to add new people to old processes than new processes to old people.

Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability. Nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a thousand people. Everybody learns at some point.

The act of judging people in advance will retard their development.

Focus on the road, not the wall. When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. 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.

There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are.

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.