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

by Ben Horowitz

brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.

“We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “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.

For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

Generally, people who think one-on-one meetings are a bad idea have been victims of poorly designed ones. The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.