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

by Ben Horowitz

In my experience it’s pretty simple. No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

The more brains working on the hard problems, the better. In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. 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. As the open-source community would explain it, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

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.

TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER