The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz, a co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote this 2014 book to address the parts of leadership that most management advice ignores: what to do when everything is going wrong. Drawing on his experience building and selling the software company Loudcloud and its successor Opsware through the dot-com crash and beyond, Horowitz tackles brutal decisions like laying off employees, demoting a loyal friend, and keeping a company alive when failure looks certain. His advice is concrete and unsentimental, covering hiring and firing executives, managing your own psychology as a CEO, and telling the truth in a crisis. Each chapter opens with hip-hop lyrics, a reflection of Horowitz's personal voice. Rather than offering a neat formula, the book argues that the hardest problems have no easy answers.
What you might want to know about The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A veteran tech founder and venture capitalist shares hard-won lessons on running a company through the crises that business books usually skip.
He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who previously built and sold the software companies Loudcloud and Opsware.
It focuses on the hardest, messiest parts of leadership, like layoffs and near-failure, that most business books skip, drawing on Horowitz's own difficult experiences as a CEO.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things was written by Ben Horowitz, published in 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is 145 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Hard Thing About Hard Things takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
