Dimensions
152 x 229 x 26mm
Every entrepreneur starts a company with a clear vision for success: an amazing environment, the smartest people, and a beautiful product. But things don’t go as planned. You will have issues with your product, the market isn’t where you expected, and your employees are starting to quit. The problems pile up, and you start questioning yourself. But what you don’t realize is that these are the hard things about running every business.
There are lots of people talking about how great it is to start a business, and very few talking about how tough it is to run one.
In THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS, Ben Horowitz draws on his experiences founding, running, selling, buying, investing in and supervising technology companies to share real advice on the problems that confront their leaders every day. His blog has earned a wide spectrum of readers who have come to rely on his blend of insight, humor, example, and clarity to run their businesses.
A lifelong rap fanatic, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs. Indeed, his use of rap lyrics inspired a feature story in the New York Times and led Fortune to proclaim him “Silicon Valley’s most famous VC rapper.” His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own fascinating rise-from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to running the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet’s first web browser).
In the book, he will expand on some of his most significant and shared posts, and provide a wealth of new advice, making The Hard Thing About Hard Thingss required reading, both for veteran entrepreneurs and those aspiring to one day start their own new ventures.
Horowitz offers lessons on dealing with the toughest questions of running a startup, most of which are never addressed in business schools:
•How do you demote (or fire) a loyal friend?
•Is it OK to hire people from your friend’s company?
•How can you minimize office politics?
•Should you create titles and promotions, and how should you deal with them?
•How do you select the right outside executives, and how do you get them to join?
•How can you manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you?
•Why does Andreessen Horowitz prefer founder CEOs, and how can you become one?
•Should you sell your company, and how should you do it?
THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS gives you the tools you need to run your company every day.
