Review Of Ben Horowitz's “The Hard Things About Hard Things”

Ben Horowitz’s “The Hard Things About Hard Things” serves as a realistic guide to entrepreneurs since, it focuses more on “what to do when things don’t go right, rather than how to get things right”. It is a mold of the uncomfortable truths, struggles and difficulties which most of the entrepreneurs go through to witness success.

Written from a CEO’s perspective, the book covers the series of events, experiences and decisions that took a moderately successful employee towards becoming one of the most successful entrepreneur.

The first quarter of the book serves as the core unfolding the exiting elements of Ben’s career.Staring from a summer job in Silicon Graphics, becoming a Vice President of Netscape and cofounding LoudCloud and transforming it into Opsware under his guidance, then selling it to Hewlett Packard and transforming to venture capitalist. He reveals the honest struggles, mistakes and sleepless nights went through in each of these phases and what took him to overcome those situations.

The second quarter of the book mainly focusses on his thoughts on start up struggles, employee management techniques, leadership skills and harsh decisions. He marks out the decision that he had to take to lay off employees, fire an executive and demote a friend and the sequence of steps that were followed towards implementation of these decisions. Ben also focuses on the importance of maintaining a positive work culture by reducing internal politics, employee training and performance assessments. He also mentions about the CEO’s psychological meltdown and its first rule. I.e “not talking about a meltdown”. He relates his experiences to these components but also warns that it may not work for everyone, since work environments are different from one another.

The Second half of the book goes around his journey as a CEO. Ben lays out his views on leadership attributes and his take on leadership courage and fear. He jots down the differences between a War CEO and a Peace CEO and summarizes that CEO evaluation process is revolved around three main questions-

Does a CEO know what to do? Can he get the company to do what he knows? Are the results achieved?.

In the last chapters, Ben writes on the impact accountability can create in a business. His view’s on accountability is for creation of effort, keep commitment and achievement of results. Ben’s also devotes his time to an incident that took place between two his teams and how the “Freaky Friday” management technique that led to a switch of team departments helped solve the conflict and issue.

Horowitz also notes that the toughest decision to ever make is to sell the company. He writes that logic and emotion are two influential factors that played a part in his decision to sell the company to Hewlett Packard.In the final chapter , Ben takes us into his new role as a venture capitalist. The uncovers various details on its founding and its focus on network segmentation into engineers, analysis’s, investors and companies.

The book consists of a series of realistic conversations and offer an invaluable insight on the aspects of founding , investment, managing and selling of a business with straight and honest talk. Ben’s marks that the success of a business or a CEO is not dependent on a formula or a recipe, but rather due to courage, struggles and making tough decisions. The Hard Things About Hard Things can serve as a great tool tin guiding the new entrepreneurs and start-ups, providing them the advices to deal with uncertainty.

Ben Horowitz, style of using different quotes and lyrics from various raps of his favorite songs and relating them to his experiences make it more interesting and worth reading. For a starter like me, Ben’s experiences are a real inspiration and enabled me to understand that the world of entrepreneurship is not as glamorous as it seems, the struggle is real and we are not alone. Yet success can be achieved with courage and willpower to make tough decisions.

I highly recommend this book for those seeking the guidelines of starting a business and making sure of it survival.