Best Quotes from “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz

You’re the founder & CEO of a company that’s just been valued at $2 Billion — sounds great, I know. But just how hard is it to achieve such a feat @bhorowitz draws from his wealth of experience to give us the scoop in his brilliant book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things.”

Getting real-life insight into entrepreneurship and running a business can be tricky, especially if, like me, you haven’t actually taken the plunge.

There are a lot of great books out there about creating a business(e.g. “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries) and about building products people love (e.g. “Inspired” by @Marty Cagan), but books that give you insight into what it’s like to actually be in “the thick of it” are rare.

I believe Ben’s book brilliantly fills the gap of what it looks like to truly get in the battle of starting and running a business. He talks plainly not just about the exhilaration of running and scaling a business, but also (and in my opinion, more importantly,) about “The Struggle”. In other words, the gut wrenching difficulty of such an undertaking, which if under-estimated, can lead to almost certain failure.

His experience enables him to give us unique insights into the difficulty and dynamics of running a business. He doesn’t stop there though; he gives a ton of practical advice to help you navigate the sea of difficulty to what may someday be a bed of roses.

To give you a flavour of this great book, I’ve picked out some of the best quotes and put them (loosely) into 3 categories.

1 — On the difficulty of building a business & being CEO.

“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 — you just have to find it. It matters not whether your chance is at 9 in 10 or 1 and 1000, your task is the same.”

“There is always a move. Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.”

“People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO[…]to make it through the struggle without quitting or offering up too much.”

“All the mental energy used to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could’ve done and devote all of your time to what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.”

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

“Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be markedly consistent in their answers. They all say, ‘I didn’t quit’.”

2 — On People, Management, and Culture

“My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organisations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic process can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.”

“What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merits and contribution.”

“By managing the organisation as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimised the present at the expense of the downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how do the organisation produced the numbers. It penalises managers who sacrificed to future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if the investment cannot be easily measured.”

“You must recognise that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviours.”

“Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long term consequence. Like technical debt the trade off sometimes makes sense but often does not. More important, if you incur to management that without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.”

3 — On Courage and Brilliance

“Years later I asked Herb why he believed in our company at a time when nobody else did. I pointed out that, at the time, Alan & Company wasn’t very involved in technology, let alone data center automation. Herb replied “I didn’t understand anything about your business and I understood very little about your industry. What I saw was two guys come to visit me when every other public company CEO and chairman was hiding under the desk. Not only did you come see me, but you were more determined and convinced you would succeed than guys running giant businesses. Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me”.”

“As I got further into it, I realised that embracing the unusual part of my background would be the key to making it through. It will be those things that would give me unique perspectives and approaches to the business. The things that I would bring to the table that nobody else had.”

“When I work with entrepreneurs today, this is the main thing that I try to convey. Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not there, they do not exist. I can relate to what they’re going through, but I can not tell them what to do. I can help them find it themselves. And sometimes they can find peace where I could not.”

“As I got further into it, I realised that embracing the unusual part of my background would be the key to making it through. It will be those things that would give me unique perspectives and approaches to the business. The things that I would bring to the table that nobody else had.”

Thank you @bhorowitz for a brilliant and helpful book.

“The death of a dream is the day that you stop believing in the work it takes to get there.” — Chris Burkmenn

This article was written as part of the “One Side Project Challenge”. My challenge is to read 52 books this year and share thoughts and insights on a monthly basis.

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