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

by Ben Horowitz

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

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.”

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.

had launch parties but no landing parties.

A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.

Once you decide that you will have to lay people off, the time elapsed between making that decision and executing that decision should be as short as possible.

Managers must lay off their own people. They cannot pass the task to HR or to a more sadistic peer.

The message is for the people who are staying. The people who stay will care deeply about how you treat their colleagues.

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.