Ben Horowitz, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential leadership advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn't cover, based on his popular ben's blog.
While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult entrepreneurship is when it comes to running one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he's gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.
Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is an invaluable management book for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.
This is not another theoretical management guide. It's a field manual for the toughest challenges you'll face as a leader:
- The CEO Mentality: Learn how to make the right call when there are no good options, from firing loyal friends to knowing the right time to cash in.
- Startup Advice: Get unflinching, practical wisdom for the real problems business school doesn't cover, drawn from Horowitz's own humbling experiences.
- Wartime Leadership: Understand the hard-won insights gained from developing, managing, and selling technology companies through the dot-com crash and beyond.
- Unconventional Wisdom: See how lessons from his favorite rap songs can be amplified to solve the most complex business challenges.
Table of Contents:
Introduction -- Chapter 1. From Communist to Venture Capitalist -- Chapter 2. I Will Survive -- Chapter 3. This Time with Feeling -- Chapter 4. When Things Fall Apart -- The Struggle -- CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is -- The Right Way to Lay People Off -- Preparing to Fire an Executive -- Demoting a Loyal Friend -- Lies That Losers Tell -- Lead Bullets -- Nobody Cares -- Chapter 5. Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits-In that Order -- A Good Place to Work -- Why Startups Should Train Their People -- Is It Okay to Hire People from Your Friend's Company? -- Why It's. Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies -- Hiring Executives: If You've Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? -- When Employees Misinterpret Managers -- Management Debt -- Management Quality Assurance -- Chapter 6. Concerning the Going Concern -- How to Minimize Politics in Your Company -- The Right Kind of Ambition -- Titles and Promotions -- When Smart People Are Bad Employees -- Old People -- One-on-One -- Programming Your Culture -- Taking the Mystery Out of Scaling a Company -- The Scale Anticipation Fallacy -- Chapter 7. How to Lead Even When You Don't Know Where You are Going -- The Most Difficult CEO Skill -- The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage -- Ones and Twos -- Follow the Leader -- Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO -- Making Yourself a CEO -- How to Evaluate CEOs -- Chapter 8. First Rule of Entrepreneurship: There are No Rules -- Solving the Accountability vs. Creativity Paradox -- The Freaky Friday Management Technique -- Staying Great -- Should You Sell Your Company? -- Chapter 9. The End of the Beginning -- Appendix: Questions for Head of Enterprise Sales Force -- Acknowledgments -- Credits.
Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly ten million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Horowitz lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Felicia.
Harper Business
Pub Date: March 04, 2014
ISBN: 9780062273208
304 pages
hardcover