Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valleys most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitzs personal and often humbling experiences.
[...]... top The key to answering the ultimate question was knowing the state of the team Were they up for yet another giant challenge or were they at the end of a very long road? I decided to bring my direct reports into the loop and ask them what they thought The answers came back clear: Everyone, with the exception of one person who felt that the opportunity in front of us was still quite large, opted for the. .. came to the all-company meeting as she always did This time her parents were in town, so they came, too The meeting did not go well People did not realize how close to the edge we were, so the news of the IPO didn’t make anyone happy The news of the reverse split made them even less happy—in fact, it infuriated them I had literally cut their fantasy number in half, and they were not pleased about it... relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same... John: Ben, the office said not to bother you, but I just want to let you know that Felicia stopped breathing, but she is not going to die.” Ben: “Not going to die? What?!?! What happened?” I could not believe it I had been so focused on work that I had lost focus of the only thing that really mattered to me Once again, I neglected to worry about the one thing that I should have worried about Ben: “What... through the meeting I had no idea where I was half the time During the three weeks we were on the road, comparable companies in our market lost half of their value, which meant that our $10 share price was roughly double the current benchmark The bankers recommended that we lower the price of the offering to $6 a share in order to reflect this new reality, but they gave us no assurance that the deal... done Then, the day before the offering, Yahoo, the lighthouse company of the Internet boom, announced Tim Koogle, its CEO, was stepping down We had hit the nadir of the dot-com crash The Loudcloud offering finally sold at $6 a share, and we raised $162.5 million, but there was no celebration and no party Neither Goldman Sachs nor Morgan Stanley the two banks that took us public—even offered us the traditional... Koogle is?” She then relived the conversation we’d had eleven years earlier It went something like this: Ben: “We’re fucked.” Felicia: “What do you mean? What happened?” Ben: “Yahoo fired Koogle It’s over The whole thing is over.” Felicia: “Who is Koogle?” Ben: “He was the CEO of Yahoo We’re fucked I’m going to have to shut the company down.” Felicia: “Are you sure?” Ben: “Didn’t you hear me? They fired... pieces I wanted all the data and information I could get, but I didn’t need any recommendations about the future direction of the company This was wartime The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility If everybody I had hired—and who gave their lives to the company—could be sent home with little to show for it, then there were no... everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.” Michael had a way of making things extremely clear We thanked him and headed to the airport We called both EDS and IBM to let them know that we would complete the process over the next eight weeks and sell the Loudcloud business to someone If they wanted to play, they had to move on that schedule or withdraw immediately The. .. sell the company So, when EMC implied that it wanted to buy us, I thought nothing of it We were trading at about $6.50 per share and I wasn’t planning to sell at anything close to that price But this time the news of the offer leaked to the press and the stock shot up to $9.50 per share, changing the economic equation, especially since the stock was going up for all the wrong reasons Ironically, the . forgotten about the fistfight I’d been in the day before. During a pickup basketball game in the San Fernando Valley, a six-foot-two-inch, crew-cut- sporting, camouflage-pants-wearing, fraternity-boy-looking. chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night. or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is