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

by Ben Horowitz

but often must go against what she knows to be true.

result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.

“What Are We Not Doing?”

conventional wisdom had nothing to do with the truth and the efficient market hypothesis was deceptive.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I

Startup CEOs should not play the odds.

it’s the ability to focus and make

the best move when there are no good

m...

Andy explained that humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news. For example, if a CEO hears that engagement for her

application increased an incremental 25 percent beyond the normal growth rate one month, she will be off to the races hiring more engineers to keep up with the impending

tidal wave of...

she will be equally intense and urgent in exp...

only took action on the positive indicator and only looked for alternative

explanations on the negative leading indicator.

If this advice sounds too familiar. and you find yourself wondering why your honest e...

“There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.”

to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door.

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.

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time...

Because in the end, nobody cares; just ru...

Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack

“What do you look for in a sales rep?”

“Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking

Apparently, this manager didn’t think that meeting with his people was all that important

and I hadn’t explained to him why it was so important.

When you fired the person, how did you know with certainty that the employee both understood the expectations

of the job and was still missing them?

The best answer is that the manager clearly set expectations when she trained t...

They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving.

Functional training can be as simple as training a new employee on your expectations for them

Training in such topics as negotiating, interviewing, and finance will enhance your company’s competency

Therefore, training must be mandatory.

(functional and management)

Enforce functional training by withholding new employee

requisitions.

motivation and training.

employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training

program for the TBH,

“To Be H...

Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

They are responsible for right product/right time and...

(the company, our revenue funding,...

and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winnin...

Good product managers don’t get all of their time sucked up by the various organizations that must

Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the “how”), and manage

the delivery of the “what.”