The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ratings94
Average rating4.1
One of the best business biographies I've read - up there with Andy Grove, Henry Ford and Sam Walton. And definitely the most honest and heartfelt. Brilliant.
I admit this book was not for me and was hyped to be something I should have anticipated. This is great if you're a big publicly-traded company. Or if you have dozens or hundreds of employees. Or if you're into the world of Silicon Valley tech startups.
I'm a service business of 3 in middle America. None of this relates to me in the least. Points for being detailed where other books bluster. But not ideal for truly small businesses.
First third is a totally fascinating story of how he got started with his business and how the tech world has progressed as a whole. The rest of it (advice, lessons learned) is must read material for CEOs or entrepreneurs managing people.
Until reading Ben Horowitz's book, ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things,' I knew that he's a successful VC but didn't realize that what made him such was his previous career as a Co-founder and CEO, who struggled hard before his company acquired.
This book is teaching a lot about leadership and taking care of your people.
“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” (p. 92)
“There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid” (p. 207)
one of the books that taught me that running a company is easy, while running a successful company is quite the opposite. and most importantly: why is it so?
Ben Horowitz within “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” talk about the challenges to build and manage organization especially on fast paste technologies. At the beginning of the book Ben clarifies this is not recipe book and every situation needed to be dealt with differently.
Ben divide the CEOs to two groups; peace time and war time CEOs. Then he mainly focus on war time CEO's style and challenges, for one thing he believes majority of management books in the market have their content mainly on peace time CEOs or their experiences/styles during peace time. He strongly believes company need to be managed by war time CEOs during the war and behave totally differently in compare with peace time.
Horowitz illustrates his struggle on several crises he have been through and explained how he survived when the survival was against the odds. There are valuable stuff within the book ranging from what is good organization and what is bad organization, what is good manager/executive and what is bad manager/executive, value of feedback, how to layoff, how to hire and tones of other things that can come handy for entrepreneur or high level executives.
This book tell you loud and clear; be careful what you wish for if you are planning to be CEO or start your own venture. I have been through the audio book multiple times and gain a lot of insight from this book.
It's the type of books you'd want to have read ten years ago.
Way above my league, still thrilling to read. It requires time to digest.
A lot of Silicon Valley brainwashing and “look at me how incredibly smart I am and everyone else is a dumbass”. But still a lot of nuggets of good and actionable advices. So I would recommend reading it, but don't follow it by the letter.