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

by Ben Horowitz

(big enterprise companies can’t generally succeed with small acquisitions, because too much of the important intellectual property is the sales methodology, and big companies can’t build that).

it makes sense to pay the CEO, so that the decision to keep or sell the company isn’t a direct response to the CEO’s personal financial situation, as in “I don’t think that we should sell the company, but I live in an eight-hundred-fifty-square-foot apartment with my husband and two kids and it’s that or divorce.”

company ever reaches that price, the employee will assume the company will be sold. If she dodges the question with the standard “the

One way to avoid these traps is to describe the analysis in the prior section: If the company achieves product-market fit in a very large market and has an excellent chance to be number one, then the company will likely remain independent. If not, it will likely be sold.

First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders.

most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created

tasks: running things, strategy, and deals.

I could not show weakness in public. It would not have been fair to the employees, the executives, or the public company shareholders. Unrelenting confidence was necessary.

Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic.

I can relate to what they’re going through, but I cannot tell them what to do. I can only help them find it in themselves. And sometimes they can find peace where I could not.

There is a big difference between people who can write a game plan and people who can follow a game plan.