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

by Ben Horowitz

“This the real world, homie, school finished They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.”

Nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. 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 on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

The reasons for voting “no” never referred to Mark’s lack of strength, but rather to his abundance of weakness: Mark went to Southern Utah.

We had fifty new hires and I had them all excited about selling and enthusiastic about working for the company. Mark Cranney walks up to the podium, looks at the crowd of fresh new recruits, and says, ‘I don’t give a fuck how well trained you are. If you don’t bring me five hundred thousand dollars a quarter, I’m putting a bullet in your head.’ ”

let me explain. I came to work because it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend twelve to sixteen hours a day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It’s why I come to work.”

In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective, and make a difference for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.

Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong.

The amazing thing was that every one of those GO employees counted GO as one of the greatest work experiences of their lives. The best work experience ever despite the fact that their careers stood still, they made no money, and they were front-page failures. GO was a good place to work.

These are all fine questions, but often the right question is the one that isn’t asked: 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 the employee for the job. If you don’t train your people, you establish no basis for performance management. As a result, performance management in your company will be sloppy and inconsistent.

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

Teaching can also become a badge of honor for employees who achieve an elite level of competence.

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.

All desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically, nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $150 billion–plus market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”