16 min read ⌚ 

MicroSummary: Silicon Valley legend Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a no-nonsense peek into the challenging world of startups. When you intend to start a startup, you pass through a lot of emotional stages. The “idea moment” comes with joy, pride, and excitement.

The second stage is usually the research part. Mixed emotions flash up when you think about where your ideas fit best.

Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Building a business from scratch is not an easy thing to do. Keeping it in an unstable and rapidly changing market is even harder.

In our summary of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” we will present you a brief overview of Loudcloud’s story, and along with it, we will list the qualities you have to possess, and how you should act in times of crisis.

So, let’s begin.

Who Should Read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”? and Why?

Author of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” Ben Horowitz is the person who “sailed” the Loudcloud ship through turbulent business waters, before selling it to Hewlett-Packard for $1.65 billion.

In his book, he presents his ideas that not a thing exists in this world that can promise entrepreneurial success.

We recommend this part-autobiography, part guidebook book to everyone who is setting off to build a company or is going through a business struggle.

It may be just the thing you need to persist through the rough times.

About Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz is a general partner and co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

“The Hard Thing About Hard Things Summary”

If you have a start-up, you know it, if you want to have a start-up, you should know it: each start-up faces the struggle.

It is something you cannot avoid.

Unplanned things will happen. You will realize your product has flaws that are expensive to fix. Your finances will run low, and your investors may bail. Customers may leave you. Valuable employees may leave you too.

No exact formula can save you from those unplanned bumps on the road. Moreover, when you do encounter problems, no recipe will tell you how to fix them with certainty.

We have to be honest here; your company may not even make it.

However, what separates entrepreneurs who make it from those who fail is one essential trait. Winners do not quit.

There’s no way around the Struggle and no formula for fixing your problems. Your company might not make it. Entrepreneurs who make it share one characteristic: They do not quit.

If you are in a crisis, you will most probably need to cut your staff. Make sure that when you lay off, you do it the right way. Do not let the word out that you are planning on letting people go – this may cause you many more problems. Instead, fire people as soon as you decide to do so.

Additionally, make the managers deliver the bad news to their employees. Do not outsource the task. Keep being human, and explain to people that it is not their fault that they lost their jobs.

Keep taking care of people.

When Netscape veterans Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen founded their cloud services provider Loudcloud, they soon hit a bumpy road.

Seven months after they launched it in 1999 they had booked $10 million in contracts. They were hiring up to thirty employees a month – they did it so fast that workers had to sit in the hallways.

However, the dot-com crash followed. Start-ups were collapsing all over the place, and Loudcloud’s investors started backing out.

Facing such an issue in the private market, the board of Loudcloud decided to take the company public. It was indeed a risky move, and although the company raised money out of the IPO, nobody was celebrating.

The dot.com crisis grew even deeper, and Loudcloud had to layoff 15% of its employees.

Following the layoff, its stock prices fell.

However, as Horowitz built his software company, he never stopped acting. Instead, he responded to each issue he faced with bold moves. In the end, he decided to sell the company, and it was heartbreaking, but now he considers it to be one of the best business moves of his career.

“We’d built something from nothing, saw it go back to nothing again and then rebuilt it into a $1.65 billion franchise.”

You can read more on Horowitz’s journey in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”.

And now, we move on to the key lessons that we picked out from his story.

Key Lessons from “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”

1.      Getting Through the Hard Times
2.      Running Your Growing Company
3.      What Makes a Leader?

Getting Through the Hard Times

• “Don’t put it all on your shoulders.”

Remember that you do not have to bear everything alone. Two brains are better than one. More than two is even better.

• Remember “there is always a move.”

Whenever you think you are out of moves, think harder. You are never out of options and always have a move to make.

• “Play long enough, and you might get lucky.”

The world changes quite rapidly. Tomorrow may be the day you will find the answer to your problem, so hang on there and survive to see another day.

• “Tell it like it is

Do not hide all of your issues from your workers. Instead, be open about your firm’s problems and let those who can help – help you.

Running Your Growing Company

If you succeed to grow your organization to a point when you reach 1000 employees, be prepared that it will be a completely different organization than it was in the beginning.

There are some new challenges you will have to cope with:

• Minimizing company politic
• Hiring employees with the “right kind of ambition.”
• Promoting a strong culture

What Makes a Leader?

A leader’s character and behavior have to be a combination of the characteristics below:

• “The ability to articulate the vision.”
• “The right kind of ambition.”
• “The ability to achieve the vision.”

Bear in mind that each quality enhances the others, so make sure you work on all of them, even though you may feel you are stronger in some of them.

To know where you stand as a CEO (if you are one), or how well your company’s CEO performance is, you can ask yourself three questions.

• “Does the CEO know what to do?”
• “Can the CEO get the company to do what she knows?”
• “Did the CEO achieve the results against an appropriate set of objectives?”

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“The Hard Thing About Hard Things” Quotes

Our Critical Review

By writing “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” Horowitz shows that he is not only a successful business person but a first-rate storyteller as well. He teaches readers using a refreshing approach and allusions from real-life famous people such as Jay Z, Dr. Seuss, or Clint Eastwood.

Few More Insights

At the third level, you’re trying to put data together. Trying to figure out how to actually get your startup off the ground. That’s the stage of fears and doubts. Almost all your question starts with “Can I?”

Can I do that? Can I overcome those obstacles? Can I implement my ideas well?

You might have an excellent educational background. Congrats! But does it help you now? No. Not really.

You’ve already spent countless hours reading amazing stories about successful entrepreneurs. Those stories energized you and got you to dream BIG. Everything seems so easy to achieve. The people you read about seemed to become super successful overnight.

But the reality is very much different from everything you’ve learned or read about. You can’t predict the future, that’s for sure. But you can predict plenty of challenging moments you’ll have to deal with. This is what Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things is all about.

Ben Horowitz – one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced investors – decided to go beyond his popular blog and share his insights on the challenges of startups in a book.

We firmly believe The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a must-read for every entrepreneur, from veterans to beginners.

We’ve gathered our favorite 30 nuggets – visual quotes from books – below to convince you about that!

| New Extended | The Hard Thing About Hard Things Summary

Have you ever imagined yourself as the CEO of a high-growth technology company in the middle of the internet bubble of the 2000s? No? Well, this is the scenario and adventure that Ben Horowitz tells in this masterpiece of digital entrepreneurship.

The book tells Ben’s saga in charge of a startup called Opsware which was later sold to HP for $1.6 billion. Mandatory reading for first-time CEOs, high-growth startups, and investors who want to know what it’s like to be on the other side of the negotiating table.

The book addresses the challenges of going through difficult times without giving up and always focusing on developing the business despite adversity.

Being a CEO is being able to bet when there are no options. There are dozens of management and leadership books written by CEOs and top executives.

The problem with these books is that they explain what to do in a company when the direction is relatively clear, and the business is focused on becoming the market leader and continue to grow.

But the day-to-day running of a founding CEO of a company is very different.

It’s complicated being a CEO, but if there is one critical skill that stands out in the best CEOs is the ability to do the right thing even when there are no good options.

There are times when you will want to hide, and things will not be going well, but it is in those hours that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

Ben Horowitz, at his company Opsware, had to deal with the internet bubble burst of 2000 and start over again his product line to prevent the company from bankrupting.

The situation was so critical that Ben held a meeting at Opsware and asked employees who were thinking about resigning to do so at the time.

This action forced the remaining professionals who believed in the company to focus on growth and allowed the others to leave.

This effort to ensure that only those members of the team who truly believed in the business stayed, was the right choice and, in the long run, pushed the stock price from cents to $ 7 in record time.

Decider Or Executor?

There are two types of CEOs. The first type has a decision-making profile, with a focus on defining the organization’s path, vision, and strategy, but prefers not to focus specifically on day-to-day implementation, management and performance.

Founding CEOs have this profile.

Bill Gates, for example, set an early clear vision for Microsoft: to have a PC on every table of every person in the world. This profile likes to make important strategic decisions and play chess, coldly calculating the game against its competitors.

However, they do not like execution very much, consisting of training, performance management, process design, among others. This sometimes causes organizations managed by this profile to become disorganized and chaotic.

On the other hand, CEOs with a more implementation-focused profile tend to be more focused on the process itself, in performance and do not tend to make big decisions or strategic moves.

Often, this type of management can result in organizations that, faced with a major decision, slow down or make more consensual decisions which are risky.

Regardless of the CEO profile you are, you need to understand your weaknesses and work to develop them.

Knowing How to Fire Is As Important As To Help

If you’re a CEO, you’re going to have to fire people at some point. And if you feel that this time has come, you have to be fast and fair.

Holding low potential professionals in the company or who are not going according to the expected lowers the productivity of the whole team and also damages the company culture.

Knowing who and when to dismiss is as important as knowing how to hire and you need to know how to communicate this type of situation.

If a CEO does not take action on badly performing professionals and does not communicate the facts according to the company’s expectations, rumors spread, and some stop believing in the culture and management of the company.

However, not all professionals a CEO has to fire are necessarily bad.

In many cases, as in the author’s example, external situations force the company to cut costs.

At these times, it is crucial to be fair and engage with those being fired. It is important that the company invests in fair resignation plans, relocation plans, recommendations for other companies and everything else that is possible to help the professional in this difficult time.

This is essential for maintaining team morale and also for hiring in the future. When it is a justified dismissal of a senior executive, such as a director, VP or senior managers, more attention is needed.

You must understand that, as CEO, you are responsible for the hiring mistake and communicate this to the shareholders and the board of directors. Also, you need to understand what caused the error and how to ensure that it is avoided in the future.

When it comes time to talk directly to the executive, you have to be very careful about how to communicate, planning the language first, making it clear that the decision is final and never humiliating the professional.

In addition to communicating with the executive him/herself, it is also necessary to communicate to the team and ensure that the business continues to run normally and that it is moving forward. As the legendary coach of CEOs in Silicon Valley said, you cannot let them stay, but you have to let them keep their dignity.

Human Resources And Training. Invest In It Now

Many companies say that communication is a priority, but few really know that a big company relies on taking care of the people who make it. For a good CEO, people always come before products and profits.

Therefore, it is crucial that he/she ensures the company has a good human resources department and that it detects signs of visible problems in your organization.

HR is like a quality sector of the business itself. It is not able to deliver the product itself but it tells if you are offering good products and if the quality standard is improving or not.

If for example, your company’s compensation or career plan is not competitive, it is up to HR to diagnose this and work with the CEO to ensure that it is corrected. It is also crucial to invest in training to ensure that all company employees master their responsibilities.

That is achieved through clear internal training processes. All training must be functional, giving employees the skills they need to achieve their goals and succeed.

Besides, training should be constant and always revisited. In addition to having all company professionals trained, it is also crucial to train managers.

It is essential always to make clear what is expected, what performance standards, leadership, and management practices have to be followed.

It is also important to create a continuous feedback loop, where it is always explicit to practitioners and managers what they did right and what they could do better.

Good HR and ongoing training for managers and executives will help managers multiply a culture of learning.

The Power of One-to-One Meetings

The CEO’s biggest role is to design and implement the company’s communications machine.

This architecture includes standard meetings, processes, etc. However, one of the most important rites is the one-to-one meetings each executive and manager must have their direct reports.

The one-to-one meeting exists to ensure that communication is continuously enhanced and to allow ideas to flow within the company.

For a manager to have a good one-to-one meeting with his / her leader, the important thing is to make it clear to the employee that the meeting is there for him/her, not the other way around.

The one-to-one meeting is an opportunity for the employee to share progress and challenges and it is up to the manager to help him/her overcome them.

Focus On Quality When Hiring

When recruiting, your priority is to know what skills are required for the person to be truly successful in his or her position. At Opsware, Ben was looking for a good executive to lead the company’s sales team.

The seemingly more qualified candidate had all the skills necessary to be a great VP of sales, but he did not have a good fit with the company’s culture, which upset many at the time.

Ben hired the candidate, despite the general mistrust and differences but this positively changed the company’s history.

The VP of sales who had several weaknesses but was extremely qualified was much better than a perfect candidate with few flaws. You must ensure that you hire someone whose experience is consistent with the size of the company.

An executive role in a small business is very different from an executive role in a large organization.

In large companies, executives are expected to have the ability to prioritize and analyze large volumes of incoming projects individually. In a startup, they should create their own projects and ensure they run at high speed.

These discrepancies can create problems in the work expectations regarding speed and goals to be achieved in the company at different times.

Abolish Office Policies

Internal political moves can become a challenge to creating a robust company culture. Undeserved promotions, gossip, and conflicts between areas are evils which must be cut at the root.

To avoid this kind of behavior, one must hire only ambitious people to the company itself and not just for their careers. Especially in the management and executive team, it is necessary that members focus on company success and not on political maneuvering.

It is essential to create an environment that is transparent and has regular performance evaluations, making it difficult to promote people who do not achieve their goals or only become involved in political intrigues.

Always communicate to your employees the importance of their roles and how their work will be evaluated to ensure the company’s performance continues to evolve.

Having a clear hierarchy and positions such as manager, director, and vice president really mean something, so make sure to have the best possible people occupy each of them.

Hierarchy helps people understand the value of their work and how much they have to be strategic to stay in that position.

Wartime VS Peacetime

Companies are like a roller coaster and have their ups and downs. High or low, the CEO needs to adopt different positions.

In times of peace, the company already has an advantage over other competitors in the market, and it is the role of the CEO to focus on increasing this advantage, guaranteeing prosperity.

A peacetime strategy is the case of Google, a company that has never faced competition and remains focused only on improving its products, so its priority is to increase the speed with which people access the internet.

Google has a search engine, and many extremely popular services and faster connections could make them even more popular.

In times of peace, the CEO focus is on developing the creativity of its employees. When Google offers 20 percent of its time to new initiatives, it’s saying times are good and thriving. In times of war, everything changes.

With a different macroeconomic context, new challenges arise in the technological scenario, and they can challenge the survival of the company. The CEO in wartimes has a huge responsibility. The life and death of the company are in your hands and depend on your decisions.

Take into account Andy Grove, who was CEO of Intel in the 1980s.

At that time more than 80% of his team was producing computer memories, and the company was attacked by Japanese semiconductor companies producing superior products at a much lower cost.

Grove decided to change the direction of the company and invest in microprocessors, a decision that at the time seemed insane but later proved to be a sound strategy. In times of war, you have to be willing to take risks and take strategic steps to ensure that the company stays on track.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Many investors and company boards wonder if CEOs are a natural born way or nurtured over a lifetime.

The truth is that good CEOs mature on a daily basis. To lead a business, you need to develop specific skills and characteristics for this challenging position.

That means it’s almost impossible to say whether a CEO will be successful early in his career or his first job as CEO.

It is necessary to be aware of the characteristics that big CEOs tend to exhibit, and for the first-time CEO, it is important to assimilate and repeat them. One of the most important points is the ability to offer good feedback.

A good technique is called “Shit sandwich.” For each difficult or delicate topic, always try to put it between two other positive topics. Mature executives tend to see this approach as rehearsed and insincere, so it works best with younger collaborators.

Finally, CEOs need to learn to feel comfortable doing things that are essentially uncomfortable. Just as boxers need to train skills involving their legs, it is the CEO’s role to do unnatural tasks in a natural way.

Selling Your Company Is An Emotional And Rational Process

There are 3 types of business acquisitions in the technology industry. The first is the acquisition of talent / intellectual property, and usually, it occurs in the range of $ 5 to 50 million.

The second is the acquisition focused on bringing the purchased company’s products so the buyer can sell them to their current customers and thus expand their product portfolio.

These acquisitions are in the range of $ 25-250 million. The third type is when the company to be acquired may break with the business model of the company it buys, as in the case of HP’s purchase of Opsware for $ 1.6 billion in 2007.

Every acquisition is hard to handle emotionally and justified rationally. The emotional difficulty stems from the feeling of selling out the team and getting out of a business that had a consistent revenue volume and steady growth.

You can not let these emotions take away your rationality and your decision-making power.

Communicate with all stakeholders and align expectations to ensure that the goals of all those involved in the business are clearly communicated.

Also, make sure you, as CEO, have a competitive salary at the company to ensure that your interest in the business is not compromised by your personal finances. By taking a rational perspective, you will always wonder if selling is a right choice.

One rule of thumb is to not sell if you have the advantage of first moving into a large market that you believe will lead. That is hard to estimate and, therefore, this subject requires a great analysis by company managers and mainly the CEO.

Final Notes:

Being a CEO is a difficult, lonely and challenging task. You need to know how to deal with your emotional and also understand how it impacts people’s lives. You must know how to hire and fire quickly and ensure fair treatment and constant training.

Learn to work with pressure, stress and all the challenges that come with the idea of being the CEO of a startup, so at the end of the journey, the payoff can be great.

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Emir Zecovic

Emir is the Head of Marketing at 12min. In his spare time, he loves to meditate and play soccer.