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    The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
    The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
    The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
    Audiobook7 hours

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

    Written by Ben Horowitz

    Narrated by Kevin Kenerly

    4.5/5

    ()

    • Leadership

    • Company Culture

    • Communication

    • Decision Making

    • Entrepreneurship

    • Mentor

    • Underdog

    • Hero's Journey

    • Mentorship

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Rags to Riches

    • Mentor Figure

    • Fall From Grace

    • Ticking Clock

    • Power Struggle

    About this audiobook

    Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's 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 Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

    Editor's Note

    Bold & inspiring…

    In case the title wasn’t enough of a giveaway, Horowitz tackles the tough issues. His leadership advice is bold and inspiring, but laced with humor and empathy — just like the best bosses.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9780062347992
    Author

    Ben Horowitz

    Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly ten million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Horowitz lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Felicia.

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    Reviews for The Hard Thing About Hard Things

    4.5/5

    988 ratings63 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a valuable resource for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and CEOs. It offers practical insights and advice on leadership, navigating challenges, and building a successful business. The book is highly recommended for anyone in the corporate or startup world, providing relatable experiences and wisdom. While some reviewers found the content useful, others criticized the tone as sexist and outdated. Overall, the book is praised for its valuable lessons on grit and perseverance.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Great book - even if you aren’t a CEO or wannabe CEO it gives you a perspective from the top - and lots of Nas lyrics

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the best business book I have listened to.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Real entrepreneur struggles and how author dealt with it. This is an entrepreneurs friend! I loved it! Definitely buying this book!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Recommended to anyone who’s a business owner or planning to be

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Fantastic insights. Nothing beats experience when talking about things that are inherently difficult. Building a good business is one of those things. Ben's insights, when added to all this makes this a must read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great read,highly recommend to anyone;CEOs or startup entrepreneurs alike,enjoyed it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Full of advice not frequently found in management books, written by someone who has “been there.” Not certain how much of this will ultimately be applicable to my experience, but it was a good read. I especially feel the usefulness for me is in being given the opportunity to know the nature of some “hard things” before they will actually come up in my life, so I can at least mentally prepare for the eventuality they may occur.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A great book, packed full of wisdom, insight, and thought-provoking ideas that don’t offer the standard ‘7 steps’ or ‘5 magic secrets’ but rather, a vision for what mature and consistent leadership can look like in a modern technological landscape that’s constantly evolving.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A must read for any manager, CEO, or founder. This book is a guide to the hard, messy problems in business, such as layoffs, losing deals, and failing companies, instead of the "happy path" in other books. It really makes you appreciate how hard it is to run a company, both strategically and emotionally.


      Fun quotes:

      Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?”
      Ben: “What?”
      Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”

      If you're going to eat shit, don't nibble.

      One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

      Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?”
      Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.”
      That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care.
      Nobody cares.
      And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

      Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs.

      As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age. How would Facebook go if Zuckerberg started it last week?

      The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts.

      The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other. You can hand off tasks with a perfect understanding of what’s expected, you pass important information from one person to another, and you can maintain high-quality transactions with no bureaucratic overhead. With four thousand people, communication becomes more difficult. Ad hoc, point-to-point communication no longer works. You need something more robust—a communication bus or, to use the conventional term for human communication buses, a process.

      Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      pretty good memoir with management advice here and there. audiobook production was great

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      good food for thought. sometimes over the top. overall I recommend it as a mechanism to fuel thought experiments and conversation around difficult business moments.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I extracted quite a few useful thoughts. Sometimes a bit boring

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great inspiration to an up and coming tech Ceo

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book for every entrepreneur out there! It gives you a great insight on the entrepreneurial journey and how to navigate it.
    • 5/5
      Love it. Hoping it will help in running a school.
    • 5/5
      Most amazing book ever! Teaches you a lot about grit and perseverance!
    • 4/5
      Excellent book on the journey of Ben Horowitzs becoming a venture capitalist. Throughout his journey, his confrontation with unpleasant and inconvenient surprises in the entrepreneurship sphere he found his way to dealt with those stunningly.
    • 5/5
      Awesome , great book, love it would read again , Thsnks
    • 5/5
      This is one of those books that you keep with you through your journey as a startup founder.
      Definitely a must Read/Listen. And when you are done, read/listen again !!
      Filled in my copy with bookmarks.
    • 5/5
      Ben wrote the book on running an organization that I wish I had read 10 years ago.
    • 5/5
      One of the best leaderships I’ve read. A little dated but easy to parse the relevant advise.
    • 5/5
      This advice and wisdom isn’t just fir business but life.
    • 5/5
      A truly brilliant manual for tech startup CEOs and other business leaders! Highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      Loved it, straight forward and sincere. I recommend it for everyone in the corporate or startup world.
    • 5/5
      Ahead of where I am but necessary for where I'm going. I'm confident this will be a 6 time read over years.
    • 5/5
      Bdj shd d d de e e e e e
    • 5/5
      This book is loaded with leadership skill, persistence,patience,understanding of the writer and how he navigated the hurdles as CEO and scaled up in his business pursuit.

      The hard thing about the hard things is a book every entrepreneur, business associates, CEO's and related persons should read to keep the flag flying until their aim, goals is achieved. Great book thanks for reading to confirm.
    • 5/5
      Relevant to any industry. Great insight from a CEO’s perspective and reality of building a business.
    • 5/5
      Great book on leadership decision making during difficult times.
    • 2/5
      Not impressed. I was hoping for a hard-nosed business book instead of what this turned out to be, which is some stories woven together with CEO and success aphorisms. Author is good at storytelling, but weak in self-awareness. Books like this have a certain entertainment value for venture capitalist or entrepreneur-as-hero types, but I don't find them very useful for sources of actionable advice in the cutting edge, 21st-century business milieu.