The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Book by Ben Horowitz
Chapter 1
Notes
- I thought that I would be best
able to handle bad news. The opposite was true: Nobody took bad news harder than I did.
- My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the
day when I stopped being too positive.
- This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess
- 56 The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know
that you cannot be replaced.
- 54 Bushido—the way of the warrior: keep death in mind at
all times
- but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focusand make the best move when there are no good moves.
- 53 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. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
- I couldn’t
believe that I’d sold what it took eight years and all of my life force to build. How could I have done that? I was sick. I couldn’t sleep, I had cold sweats, I threw up, and I cried. And then I realized that it was the smartest thing that I’d ever done in my career.
- “Not for sale” didn’t mean that we
wouldn’t listen to offers—it just meant that we weren’t trying to sell the company.
- Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
- 48 efficient market hypothesis was
deceptive. No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.
- 44We were fighting for our lives, but he was about to lose his. I decided to pay
for his health costs and find the money elsewhere in the budget. I guess i did it because i knew what desparation felt like.
- 42 Frank expected to get screwed by us. It’s what always
happened to him in his job and presumably in his personal life. We needed something dramatic to break his psychology. We needed to be associated with the airport bar, not with his job or his family.
- 41 An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization
attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
- 39 I had a CFO who didn’t know software accounting, a head of sales who had never sold software, and a head of marketing who did not know our market.
- 34 He then informed me that Atriax was bankrupt and could not pay any of the $25 million he owed us.
- I was through listening to advice about what we should do from people who did not understand all the pieces. I wanted all the data and information I could get, but I didn’t need any recommendations about the future direction of the company. This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility.
- When they finished I said, “Did I ask for this presentation?” Those were the first words I spoke as I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO.
- 32 - different to ask '“What’s the worst thing that could happen?” The answer always came back the same: “We’ll go bankrupt,' - VS - “What would I do if we went bankrupt?”
- 30 If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.
- 29 - I turned to Scott Kupor, my director offinance, and said, “We did it!” He replied, “Yeah, but we’re still fucked.”
- 25 - People offer many complex reasons for why Bill rates so highly. In myexperience it’s pretty simple. No matter who you are, you need two kinds of
friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something goodhappens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fakeexcitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who willactually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. Thesecond kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- 21 - Andy said to me, “Ben, think about how you might run the business if capital were free.”
- 10 - Following conventional wisdom is worse than knowing nothing at all.
- 11 -Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity