Author
Ben Horowitz
The CEO who ran a company through the dot-com crash and wrote down what the management books leave out.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Ben Horowitz worked at Netscape under Marc Andreessen in the 1990s, and in 1999 the two co-founded Loudcloud, a cloud-services company before the term existed. The dot-com collapse arrived within two years. Horowitz took the company public in a hostile market, sold its hosting business, and turned what remained into a software company, Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007.
In 2009 he and Andreessen founded the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and he began writing essays about management for founders in trouble. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, published in 2014, collected them alongside the memoir of the Loudcloud years, each chapter opening with a rap lyric; it became the standard text on what founding actually feels like.
His second book, What You Do Is Who You Are, published in 2019, turned to culture, drawing on examples from Haitian history and Japanese samurai codes as much as from technology companies.
The signature
Horowitz writes from the inside of a crisis, in short declarative sentences, and refuses to soften what he found there. His signature is the named hard thing, the Struggle, nobody cares, lead bullets, tell it like it is, given a label so that a founder alone at two in the morning can recognise it as normal.