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

by Ben Horowitz

leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.

After seeing their friends laid off, employees were no longer willing to make the requisite sacrifices needed to build a company.

During a time like this, it is difficult to focus on the future, because the past overwhelms you—but that’s exactly what you must do.

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.

The people who stay will care deeply about how you treat their colleagues.

they won’t place a high enough value on the areas where you need the executive to be a world-class performer.

You hired for scale too soon. The most consistently wrong advice that venture capitalists and executive recruiters give CEOs is to hire someone “bigger” than required.

The most important thing to decide is that you really want to do this.