Deep Dive: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
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.
Ben Horowitz needs no introduction, but to give a brief recitation of his accomplishments, he is a co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He was VP of Product Management at Netscape and co-founded and led Opsware Inc., a software company acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.
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So without further ado, here is a deep dive of The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
Every time I read a management 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 laying people off when you miss the big goal.
The hard thing isn't hiring great people.
The hard thing is when those "great people" develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things.
The hard thing isn't setting up an organizational 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 in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
The hard thing about hard things is there is no formula for dealing with them. But there is some advice and experience that can help with hard things.
Being scared doesn’t mean you’re gutless. It means that you will determine whether you’re a hero or a coward.
Look at the world through different prisms helps you separate facts from perception.
There comes a time in your life when you realize that you haven’t made any serious choices. You feel like you have unlimited bandwidth and can do everything in life that you want to do simultaneously, but by doing so you might lose everything, by doing everything you might fail at the most important things.
You only need one person to say yes.
You might as well take the pain now, because nobody will believe any positivity in the forecast. If you’re going to eat shit don’t be nimble.
You need to let the people who work for you know where they stand. They need to know whether they’re working for you, or are looking for another job. Treat people fairly and they will trust you.
Figuring out the product is the innovators job, not the customers job. The customer only or wants what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product.
The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge and skill and sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data.
Markets aren’t efficient finding the truth, they’re just very efficient at converging on a conclusion and sometimes that’s the wrong conclusion.
When it comes to selling a company, you have to create a dog race. And when you create a dog race, you’re gonna need a rabbit.
There is no secret to being successful, but if there’s one skill that stands out, it’s your ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.
You won’t be able to share every burden, but you should share what burdens you can. Don’t put it all on your own shoulders.
There is always a move. If you can make the best move today, you may play long enough so see tomorrow.
Don’t take it personally. Everybody makes mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an ‘F’ doesn’t help. If you wanna be great, this is the challenge.
Without trust, communication breaks down. More specifically:
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
Consider the following:
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