111 One Liners That Will Strike A Chord With Every Entrepreneur

Photo by Rohan Kapur

This weekend I finished The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

Since I have spent the majority of my career working in technology startups, I found the book so relatable to my life.

And of course, since I am building a company myself, I had to highlight every sentence that struck a chord with me.

Sharing my top 111 (Yes the list is long, but trust me you will enjoy it)

1. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.
2. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience.
3. The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.
4. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no”.
5. You need 2 kinds of friends in life — The First Kind is one you can call when something good happens. The Second Kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong.
6. By virtue of the CEO’s position nobody besides her has the complete picture.
7. Believe in artificial deadlines.
8. If you don’t treat the people who leave your company fairly, the people who stayed would never have trusted you again.
9. The only way to understand the product for the market is to ship fast and try to sell the wrong product. You will fall on your faces but you learn fast.
10. Figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
11. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore data.
12. Sometimes, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
13. There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch parties but no landing parties.
14. Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it.
15. The secret to being a successful CEO is the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.
16. The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.
17. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.
18. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone.
19. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
20. You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can.
21. Play long enough and you might get lucky.
22. Don’t take things personally.
23. CEOs should tell it like it is.
24. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.
25. In any human interaction, the required level of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
26. A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news.
27. The reason that you have to fire your head of marketing (or any department) is not because she sucks; it’s because you suck.
28. If an executive has the wrong kind of ambition then despite her skills, the company may reject her.
29. Every CEO likes to say she runs a great company. It’s hard to tell whether the claim is true until the company or the CEO has to do something really difficult. Firing an executive is a good test.
30. Ironically the key to an emotional discussion is to take the emotion out of it.
31. Humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news.
32. Nobody cares.
33. Spend zero time on what you could have done and devote all of your time on what you might do.
34. Take care of the people, the products and the profits — in that order.
35. Things always go wrong.
36. Training is the Boss’ job.
37. No startup has time to do optional things, therefore, training must be mandatory.
38. The CEO should teach the course on management expectations, because they are, after all, your expectations.
39. As CEO, one generally doesn’t have many true friends in business.
40. Often candidates who do well in interviews turn out to be bad employees.
41. When you are building an organisation, there is no organisation to design.
42. Beware of any indication that a candidate might be more of an interrupt driven employee than preferring to set the pace personally.
43. A great CEO must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs.
44. Nobody is perfect.
45. Being a CEO is a lonely job, but somebody has to do it.
46. Anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviours.
47. If you incur management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.
48. If an HR leader hoards knowledge, makes power plays, or plays politics, he will be useless.
49. Sometimes an organisation doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
50. Sometimes the right policy is the one that the CEO can follow.
51. As a company grows, it will change.
52. Political behaviour almost always starts with the CEO.
53. Politics in companies means people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution.
54. Word always gets out.
55. Hire people for the right kind of ambition.
56. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome.
57. Generally, it’s best to say nothing at all.
58. The sales organisation is the face of the company to the outside world. If that group optimises for itself, your company will have a major problem.
59. Being effective in a company means being reliable.
60. Rebels make better CEOs than employees.
61. No matter how high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work in a manner in which he can be relied upon.
62. The CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
63. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture doesn’t always make a company.
64. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioural change.
65. Entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists.
66. Move fast and break things — “Mark Zuckerberg”.
67. Dogs at work and Yoga aren’t culture.
68. The CEO’s job is knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want.
69. Many investor-board members don’t know anything about scaling a company.
70. Optimise the organisation for the people doing the work — not for their managers. This will upset managers but they will get over it.
71. It’s good to anticipate growth but it’s bad to over anticipate growth.
72. The most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things I did wrong or might do wrong.
73. The most difficult skill to learn for a CEO is the ability to manage their own psychology.
74. The first rule of psychological meltdown is don’t talk about psychological meltdown.
75. If I (the CEO) is doing a good job? Why am I feeling so bad?
76. Everybody learns to be CEO by being the CEO.
77. Everything is hard when you don’t actually know what you are doing.
78. Every problem in the company is the CEO’s fault, there’s nobody to blame.
79. CEOs make the mistake of taking things too personally.
80. If the CEO can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonising her employees or herself
81. Being a CEO is a lonely job.
82. If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
83. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
84. Great CEOs face the pain, the sleepless nights, cold sweats.e. “the torture” but they don’t quit.
85. As CEO the most important decisions test your courage far more than your intelligence.
86. The only reason the CEO can make a better decision is her superior knowledge.
87. In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult and right.
88. Everytime you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous.
89. Over the last 10 years, the technological advances to starting a company have lowered the financial barrier to starting the company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains high as ever
90. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.
91. Only the paranoid survive.
92. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity, Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully.
93. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand
94. CEO is an unnatural job.
95. To be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run.
96. Feedback is not one size fits all.
97. You may be the CEO and you may be telling somebody about something that you don’t like or disagree with, but that doesn’t mean you’re right.
98. Bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly.
99. The CEO doesn’t have to be the creator of the vision, she must be the keeper of the vision and its story.
100. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.
101. First rule of Entrepreneurship, there are no rules.
102. If your hardest working and most productive employees feel like chimps and you are looking for the culprit, look in the mirror.
103. It’s hard to make a good prediction and hard to make that prediction.
104. The executive who is spectacular in this year’s hundred person startup may be washed-up in next year’s vision when the company employs four hundred people and has $100 million in revenue.
105. The number one way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job
106. As CEO, get paid a salary it will not cause you sell your company due to financial pressure
107. There is no easy answer.
108. Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes.
109. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic.
110. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.
111. The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle

If you read this far, I recommend you read the book as well. It’s definitely one I am going to go back to multiple times.