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

by Ben Horowitz

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.

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

As a young CEO, I felt the pressure—the pressure of employees depending on me, the pressure of not really knowing what I was doing, the pressure of being responsible for tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money. As a consequence of this pressure, I took losses extremely hard.

It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.