The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is Ben Horowitz's account of running a company through the periods no management book covers: when nothing works, the biggest customer is leaving and the CEO cannot show any of it. Its lessons are that the Struggle is the job rather than a verdict, that nobody is coming to rescue you, that a company must be able to hear bad news, and that the hard decisions only the founder can make are what the founder is for.
The management books tell you how to set goals, run meetings and build culture, and none of them tell you what to do when you have three weeks of cash, a product that does not work and a team that thinks you are lying to them. Horowitz ran Loudcloud through exactly that during the dot-com collapse, and he wrote down what he wished someone had told him.
The book in essence
Horowitz's central observation is that hard things are hard because there is no formula: firing a friend, laying off people who did nothing wrong, telling a customer the product is being discontinued. His book is not a method but a set of observations that make those decisions survivable. The Struggle, his name for the period when everything falls apart, happens to every founder and means nothing about them. Nobody cares, the advice his mentor gave him, removes both the comfort of explanation and the fantasy of rescue: all that matters is what you will do. There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets, the unglamorous list worked through in order. A company must be able to hear bad news, which means the CEO tells it like it is, with the numbers, to the whole team. And the priority is fixed: take care of the people, the products and the profits, in that order.
Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud in 1999, steered it through the crash by selling its hosting business and turning the remainder into Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard later bought, and then co-founded the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. The book mixes the memoir of those years with short chapters of advice, each beginning with a rap lyric, and it is the standard text on what founding actually feels like.
Who it's for
- Founders in the Struggle right now, who need to hear that it is normal and that it is the job
- Anyone about to make a decision that hurts someone whichever way it goes, and delaying it
- First-time CEOs who have discovered that the books on leadership were written for peacetime
Who it's not for
- — Readers looking for a method for the early search for product-market fit; that is the first half of this road, and Horowitz begins where it ends
- — Anyone who wants a calm book; it is written from the inside of a crisis and reads like it
Key lessons
01
The Struggle is the job, not a verdict
Every founder hits the period when they wonder why they started, when people think they are an idiot but nobody will fire them, when they cannot sleep and everything they built looks like a mistake. Horowitz's point in naming it is that nobody is exempt and that the worst response is to conclude it means something about you. Do not carry it alone; put the problem in front of the team.
A founder in Istanbul, eight months after launch, had a churned anchor customer, a departing co-founder and a payroll due in two weeks. Recognising every symptom in the chapter changed one thing: she stopped treating the situation as proof she was the wrong person. She told the team the numbers that week, and two of them found the replacement customer.
02
Nobody cares, so play the hand
When Loudcloud was failing, Horowitz's mentor told him that nobody cares why: not the press, not the board, not the employees. All the reasons it is not your fault are irrelevant to the people who depend on you; the only thing that matters is what you are going to do. There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets, so write the list of unglamorous fixes and work through it in order.
A founder in Ankara whose main supplier failed spent three weeks explaining the lost quarter to investors. When one said kindly that nobody cared why, he wrote the lead-bullet list instead: four suppliers to call, two customers to warn, one price to renegotiate. Nine days later the list was done; the explaining had produced nothing.
03
Tell it like it is
The instinct is to protect morale by keeping the numbers vague, and it is exactly backwards. A company that cannot hear bad news cannot fix it, and the smart people you hired are wasted on problems they are not allowed to see. Trust is built by saying hard things, and a team that learns the truth late learns that it was lied to, which is the one thing morale does not survive.
A founder in Izmir with four months of runway told her team she had a year. When the truth surfaced through a late salary, three people resigned over the lie, not the money. Her replacement opened every Monday with the cash number on the whiteboard; nobody else left, and two engineers cut the cloud bill in half unasked.
04
People, products, profits, in that order
Hard decisions must be made on incomplete information, by a date you set, and explained by you in person to the people they affect. What makes them defensible is the order: take care of the people first, which means honesty, managers who actually manage and a company worth working at even while it struggles, then the products, then the profits. A decision made in the reverse order cannot be defended to anyone.
A founder in Istanbul kept her co-founder running engineering for a year after the team had outgrown him, and lost two senior engineers to the chaos. When she finally made the change, she made it herself, in person, with a real role designed for what he was good at. He stayed; the engineers did not return.
Try this today
Write down the one decision you have been delaying, set a date this week to make it on the information you have, and tell the person it affects yourself, in person.
Quick check
What does Horowitz mean by 'nobody cares'?
Why does Horowitz insist on telling the team bad news with the numbers?
Selected quotes
“Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes.”
“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits, in that order.”
“The Struggle is where greatness comes from.”