Ben Horowitz wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things for the bad weeks
Ben Horowitz nearly lost his company more than once. This book is what he learned about deciding when every option is bad.
Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud, which became Opsware, and ran it through the dot-com crash. It came close to going under more than once. HP bought Opsware for 1.65 billion dollars in 2007.
Each chapter takes one situation he faced at the company and says what he did about it. You can open it at the chapter that matches your week.
Horowitz on why the hard things are hard
Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes.
The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal.
He opens the book with it, before the first story from Opsware.They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic.
When a decision feels stuck, you can write down which part is feeling and which part is logic.Life is struggle.
A book for when the routine stops working
Most books in our library give you a method for work that repeats. Horowitz writes about the decisions that come once.
If you're running something, read it beside Atomic Habits.
See the whole shelf
Our library has every book we took a line from, and the free exercises that go with them.
Open the libraryThe book itself is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
Questions
Is it only for founders?
It's written for people running companies. The chapters on firing, demoting and telling your team the truth help anyone who manages people.
What is "the Struggle"?
Horowitz's name for the stretch when the thing you built is failing. You can't see a way out and you can't tell anyone.
When did it come out?
In 2014. By then Horowitz was running the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.