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

by Ben Horowitz

He wasn’t an easy cultural fit, but he was a genius.

in the end they all agreed that he was the best person possible for the job.

Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

If your company is a good place to work, you too may live long enough to find your glory.

one-on-one meeting with any of his employees in more than six months. While I knew to “expect what I inspect,” I did not expect this. No one-on-one in more than six months? How was it possible for me to invest so much time thinking about management, preparing materials, and personally training my managers and then get no one-on-ones for six months?

Wow, so much for CEO authority. If that’s how the managers listen to me, then why do I even bother coming to work?

Was the team now ignoring me? Had I yelled at them one time too many?

realized that while I had told the team “what” to do, I had not been clear about “why” I wanted them to do it. Clearly, my authority alone was not enough to get them to do what I wanted.

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. “In

when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”

Common thing

do you realize that there is no possible way for him to even be informed as to whether or not his organization is good or bad?”

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. Things always go wrong. Being a good company is an end in itself.

the reasons to stay at a company are many: Your career path is wide open because as the company grows lots of interesting jobs naturally open up. Your friends and family think you are a genius for choosing to work at the “it” company before anyone else knew it was “it.” Your résumé gets stronger by working at a blue-chip company in its heyday. Oh, and you are getting rich. When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave.

is that she likes her job.

In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.

The amazing thing was that every one of those GO employees counted GO as one of the greatest work experiences of their lives.

A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.

wrote, “Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.”

Product managers whom I had almost written off as hopeless became effective.

How many fully productive employees have they added?

By failing to measure progress toward the actual goal, they lose sight of the value of training.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.

organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

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.

They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

the knowledge and skill that they need to do their job. I call this functional training. Functional training can be as simple as training a new employee on your expectations for them (see “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager”) and as complex as a multiweek engineering boot camp to bring new recruits completely up to speed on all of the historical architectural nuances of your product.

training courses should be tailored to the specific job. If you attempt the more complex-style course, be sure to enlist the best experts on the team as well as the manager.

management training. Management training is the best place to start setting expectations for your management team.

Do you expect them to agree on objectives with their team? If you do, then you’d better tell them, because the management state of the art in technology companies is extremely poor. Once you’ve set expectations, the next set of management courses has already been defined; they are the courses that teach your managers how to do the things you expect (how to write a performance review or how to conduct a one-on-one).

Take your best people and encourage them to share their most developed skills. Training in such topics as negotiating, interviewing, and finance will enhance your company’s competency in those areas as well as improve employee morale. Teaching can also become a badge of honor for employees who achieve an elite level of competence.

no startup has time to do optional things.

motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program for the TBH, “To Be Hired.”

Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

they don’t project manage the various functions;

that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs.

“If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.”

First, you are not hiring an abstract executive to work at an arbitrary company.

acting is really the only way to get all the knowledge that you need to make the hire, because you are looking for the right executive for your company today, not a generic executive.

interview them first and learn what they think made them great.

What will this person do in the first thirty days? What do you expect their motivation to be for joining? Do you want them to build a large organization right away or hire only one or two people over the next year?

Write down the strengths you want and the weaknesses that you are willing to tolerate.

criteria from the following subdivisions when hiring executives:

Will the executive be an effective member of the team? Effective is the key word. It’s possible for an executive to be well liked and totally ineffective with respect to the other members of the team. It’s also possible for an executive to be highly effective and profoundly influential while being totally despised. The latter is far better. These

No matter how great an executive is, they will have trouble succeeding if the people around them sabotage everything they do. The best way to avoid that is to understand any potential issues before the person is hired.

Group one will help you determine the best candidate and group two will help you gauge how easily each candidate will integrate into your company.

have group two interview finalist candidates only.

the interviewer who asks the questions deeply understands what a good answer will sound like.

Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders.

Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness. It’s a lonely job, but somebody has to do it.

Some divisions made their numbers, but did so by underfunding R&D. They dramatically weakened their long-term competitive position and set themselves up for future disaster.