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

by Ben Horowitz

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.”

The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things.

The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

The problem with these books is that they attempt to provide a recipe for challenges that have no recipes.

There’s no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations. There’s no recipe for bui...

there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap. That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

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.

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while.

Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

Our ninth hire was a recruiter, and we hired a human resources person when we had a dozen employees. We were hiring thirty employees a month and snagging many of the Valley’s smartest people. One

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

When they finished I said, “Did I ask for this presentation?” Those were the first words I spoke as I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO.

Finally, I had to rebuild the executive team. I had a CFO who didn’t know software accounting, a head of sales who had never sold software, and a head of marketing who did not know our market. Every one of them was great at their old jobs,

You are in charge of finding the exciting value. When you do, we will deliver it.”

It was good news: We had exactly sixty days to fix all the problems and make the deployment work. If we did not, we were done. We had sixty days to live.

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

We’d done it. We saved the account and saved the company. What a relief! But we still had the small matter of the company that we’d just purchased and its fifty-seven employees.

As the years went by, Tangram proved to be a highly profitable acquisition—well beyond the critical role it played in saving the EDS account.

We were fighting for our lives, but he was about to lose his. I decided to pay for his health costs and find the money elsewhere in the budget.

I felt like I had no more stories, no more speeches, and no more “rah-rah” in me. I decided to level with the team and see what happened.

I need you to go home tonight and have a serious conversation with your wife, husband, significant other, or whoever cares most about you and tell them, ‘Ben needs me for the next six months.’ I need you to come in early and stay late. I will buy you dinner, and I will stay here with you. Make no mistake, we have one bullet left in the gun and we must hit the target.”

Of all the times I think of at Loudcloud and Opsware, the Darwin Project was the most fun and the most hard. I worked seven days a week 8 a.m.–10 p.m. for six months straight. It was full on.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true.

Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

“Not for sale” didn’t mean that we wouldn’t listen to offers—it just meant that we weren’t trying to sell the company.

Ironically, the higher the stock price went up, the more companies wanted to buy us.

believe that I’d sold what it took eight years and all of my life force to build.

How could I have done that? I was sick. I couldn’t sleep, I had cold sweats, I threw up, and I cried. And then I realized that it was the smartest thing that I’d ever done in my career. We’d built something from nothing, saw it go back to nothing again, and then rebuilt it into a $1.65 billion franchise.

I had hired all the best people that I knew or could find, and I had gone through every step from founding to going public to sale. I definitely did not feel like doing any of that again. But I had learned so much.

“What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.

The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.

I thought that it was my job and my job only to worry about the company’s problems. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have realized that it didn’t make sense for me to be the only one to worry about,

A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.

It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.