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

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, originally published in 2014, is the first book by Ben Horowitz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Horowitz built his career during the first tech boom in the late 1990s. This provided Horowitz with a wealth of experience and knowledge about being a tech company founder, and the book offers a range of ideas regarding how to navigate the Silicon Valley business world.

Horowitz has since become an influential voice in the tech. He writes a blog that is read by more than 10 million readers, and his articles have been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fortune, and The Economist. The Hard Thing About Hard Things falls into the nonfiction categories of Startups, Business Leadership, and Business Technology Innovation. Horowitz’s second book, What You Do Is Who You Are, was published in 2019.

This study guide and all its page citations are based on the Kindle edition of the text.

Summary

The Hard Thing About Hard Things offers advice to businesspeople aspiring to launch their own tech startups. It is based on the author’s personal experiences during the most difficult period of his career. This coincided with the glory days of the first dotcom boom, which ended with the tech-stock market crash of 2000. As Horowitz relates his successes and failures during this period, the book examines three key themes: Adapting to Change, Communication Is Key, and Embracing the Struggle.

The book is divided into two distinct parts. The first three chapters are biographical. While some material focuses on Horowitz’s childhood and youth, most of the material focuses on the years spanning from 1995, when he was hired by Netscape, to 2007, when he sold Opsware in a multi-billion-dollar deal.

Horowitz began his career with a master’s degree in computer science and a fascination for the potential of the Internet, which was still in its infancy when he was hired by Netscape in 1995. At that time, his company had produced the first graphical browser for surfing the net. Because Netscape Navigator was a threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Netscape and Microsoft battled for market supremacy during the 1990s in what came to be referred to as the First Browser War. Netscape was subsequently sold to AOL, and Horowitz and his partners launched LoudCloud, the first cloud-based enterprise solution system.

By the late 1990s, the craze for investing in dot-coms was reaching its peak. When the market crashed in 2000, Horowitz and his business partners were forced to reinvent their company and sell the LoudCloud component, retaining Opsware, the software that ran on the cloud platform. They decided to trade the company’s stock publicly at the worst possible time. In spite of negative market forces, Horowitz succeeded in keeping his new company out of bankruptcy, and in 2007, he and his partner, Marc Andreessen, sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. Horowitz and Andreessen subsequently founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with the intention of helping to support and grow the next generation of high-tech companies. Their firm is now worth $2.7 billion.

Horowitz discusses all of the above events in the first three chapters of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. The remaining six chapters are devoted to the lessons he’s learned. He talks about the experience of being a Founder-CEO and the difficulties that such a role entails. He emphasizes the difference between a wartime CEO and a peacetime CEO and explains that most business advice is geared toward the latter. Horowitz’s own experience was principally as a wartime CEO, and he hopes to give his readers an understanding of the skills required to succeed in such a role.

Horowitz admits that things are going to fall apart in any business at some point and suggests strategies for dealing with downturns. He also talks about the uniqueness of the CEO role since one can’t train for the job. Rather, the role can only be learned by performing it. Because the tech industry is volatile and unpredictable, Horowitz discusses the difficulties of scaling up for growth and knowing when it’s time to sell and move on. Through all of these chapters, Horowitz’s focus is principally on the people who staff an enterprise and the managers who are responsible for its growth and success. The author’s core message is that struggle should not be avoided, as it is both part of life and business. If struggle is embraced constructively, entrepreneurs will be able to push past obstacles and achieve their dreams.