The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Building a company sounds like a game of vision and strategy. In practice, Ben Horowitz says, it’s mostly the opposite: making one ugly decision after another when every option is bad. You lay off people who trusted you. You demote a friend who helped build the place. You stand in front of the team and explain why the dream just became a nightmare. Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud with Marc Andreessen during the dot-com bubble, nearly went bankrupt, and clawed his way to selling the reborn company — Opsware — to Hewlett-Packard for $1.65 billion. His verdict on what separates the founders who survive: not brilliance, but the refusal to quit.

Ben Horowitz on SummaryShelf

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers