Overview
Ben Horowitz draws on his own experience as a CEO and venture capitalist to offer practical advice on the toughest challenges in building and running a business. Unlike most business books, this one focuses on what to do when things go wrong — the hard things that no one prepares you for.
Horowitz co-founded Opsware and Andreessen Horowitz. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, published in 2014, is his memoir of running Opsware through the dot-com crash and selling it to HP for $1.6 billion. It's openly a book about what they don't teach you in business school — firing people, managing politics, handling founder depression.
Key Ideas
No recipe for hard problems
The hardest part about being a CEO is managing your own psychology while making critical decisions.
Embrace the struggle
Building a company inevitably involves struggle; great CEOs face it head-on rather than avoiding it.
Take care of people
A good company culture comes from treating employees with respect and transparency, especially during hard times.
Make the hard decisions
Layoffs, demotions, and firing friends are agonizing but sometimes necessary to save the company.
Who should read this
Founders and CEOs who are in the middle of a hard period and wondering if they are uniquely broken. They aren't, and Horowitz spends three hundred pages proving it. Also useful for senior managers about to become executives for the first time.
Who might skip it
Skip if you're not in a decision-making role — a lot of the advice is too specific to CEO-level problems to generalise well. Skip also if you dislike hip-hop lyric epigraphs; Horowitz opens every chapter with one, and some readers find it grating rather than charming.
The verdict
The most honest book I've read about running a company. Where most business books tell you what to do when things are going well, Horowitz tells you what to do when they aren't — and he does it from the scar tissue. The chapter on demoting a loyal friend is uncomfortable to read and worth the whole book. Nothing else I've read prepares you for the psychological weight of the role.
"Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic."
— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
If you liked this
What You Do Is Who You Are, Horowitz's follow-up on culture. High Output Management by Andy Grove for the older, calmer classic.