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

by Ben Horowitz

The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

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

“Well, I understand your predicament, but the time to communicate this message would have been before we spent all day cooking dinner. At this point, anything short of getting into your car and driving here immediately would be rude and leave a permanently poor impression.”

Fortunately, neither of us relied on our first impressions. We have been happily married for nearly twenty-five years and have three wonderful children.

Aweeee

INtelligently analyticaland clear thinking

Disconcert or confuse

Take small bites off

All that I ask is that if you have decided to quit that you quit today. I won’t walk you out the door—I’ll help you find a job. But, we need to know where we stand. We need to know who is with us and whom we can count on.

purgatory known as penny stocks.

Paradoxically, the only way to do that was to ship and try to sell the wrong product.

Every one of them was great at their old jobs, but not qualified for their new jobs. It was miserable, but necessary, to see them all go.

so you are now in charge of finding out what they don’t expect, but want. You are in charge of finding the exciting value. When you do, we will deliver it.”

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

It turned out that when you accounted for turnover rates and the cost of recruiting and training, Cary, North Carolina, engineers were cheaper to hire than Bangalore, India, engineers.

We were fighting for our lives, but he was about to lose his. I decided to pay for his health costs and find the money elsewhere in the budget. I never expected to hear anything else about that decision, but fifteen months later I received a handwritten letter from John’s wife letting me know that John had died. She wrote that she was absolutely shocked that I would help a total stranger and his family and that I had saved her from total despair. She went on for several paragraphs saying that she didn’t know why I did it, but it enabled her to continue living and she was eternally grateful.

:.)

We were fighting for our lives, but he was about to lose his. I decided to pay for his health costs and find the money elsewhere in the budget. I never expected to hear anything else about that decision, but fifteen months later I received a handwritten letter from John’s wife letting me know that John had died. She wrote that she was absolutely shocked that I would help a total stranger and his family and that I had saved her from total despair. She went on for several paragraphs saying that she didn’t know why I did it, but it enabled her to continue living and she was eternally grateful.

touching T.T

After all that we had been through, how could I ask the team to charge up yet another impossible mountain? How could I muster the strength to do it myself?

And it wasn’t just me. It was everybody in the office.

Goals

Eight years later, when I read what Ted had written, I cried. I cried because I didn’t know. I thought I did, but I really didn’t. I thought that I was asking too much of everybody. I thought that after barely surviving Loudcloud, nobody was ready for another do-or-die mission. I wish I knew then what I know now.

T.T

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

Quite contradicting to mvp concepts

“I don’t care about any of the existing requirements; I need you to reinvent the product and we need to win.”

He demanded mastery. Any slip-up in technique, skill, or knowledge would be met with total intolerance from Mark.

Mark: “Okay, listen carefully. Here’s what I’d like you to do. First, reach up to your face and take off your rose-colored glasses. Then get a Q-tip and clean the wax out of your ears. Finally, take off your pink panties and call the fucking vice president right now, because you do not have a deal.”

Lol

Mark set the tone: Sloppiness would not be tolerated.

Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

if I’d learned anything it was that conventional wisdom had nothing to do with the truth and the efficient market hypothesis was deceptive.

markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch parties but no landing parties.

high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics,

To an objective observer, this might sound like Bill was prudently advising me to build my contingency plan. But something in his voice and his eyes said something different. They said that he believed the contingency plan was going to be the plan.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions. Similarly, if a CEO keeps the following lessons in mind, she will maintain the proper focus when hiring, training, and building her culture.

The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle

The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.

Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats.

tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. As a young CEO, I felt the

reality was more nuanced than I was describing it. And not only did they see for themselves the world wasn’t as rosy as I was describing it; they still had to listen to me blowing sunshine up their butts at every company meeting.

If we lost a big prospect, the whole organization needed to understand why, so that we could together fix the things that were broken in our products, marketing, and sales process. If I insisted on keeping the setbacks to myself, there was no way to jump-start that process.

If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you at all, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I do not trust that you are telling me the truth.

Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic.

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.”

many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company.