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The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Hardcover – March 4 2014
Ben Horowitz
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Product details
- Publisher : Harper Business (March 4 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062273205
- Item Weight : 458 g
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.57 x 22.86 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
From the Publisher
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So perhaps it has some redeeming features, but I'm quite happy not knowing what they are.
The book seems to be a self-congratulatory lap of honour in which the author demonstrates that he is the most non-racist, inclusivistic, non-judgmental person who has ever lived. He bludgeons us through the taxonomies of his various sets of friends, almost all of whom have some claim or other to minorityship which he just *has* to mention, whilst systematically pick-axing his prose to death with the Cultural Marxist "she" when what he means is "he" (or – if you must – "they"). It's just irritating.
I have never met this man. But I have met enough people like him to know that I don't want to hear any more of what he has to say about himself.
I'm happy for him that he manages to fire his friends *and* sleep well at night. I'm happy for him that he loves himself so much he just had to write an entire book about what a fabulous fellow he is. The problem is that I simply don't feel that anyone who is as eager as he is to cram his credentials of conventionality down my throat by endorsing every single point of what happens to be Politically Correct this week can genuinely have any balls.
Ergo, he isn't a leader.
Ergo, this isn't what it claims to be: a book about leadership.

1 - Almost all the advice provided here is for C-Suite, or perhaps exclusively CEO. Corporate boardroom, shareholders, directors bonuses, right person for the right job... I found it fascinating to read about things like the personality qualities the author looks for or assumes in a CEO fit, but I feel for a lot of people this information will simply not be applicable to their day to day. Certainly there wasn't much I could draw into my day to day.
2- The books referred to throughout by the author, by the likes of Andy Grove and Peter Thiel, are in my opinion far more useful - more game-changing insights
Maybe it's just because I'm not a C-suite director or a business founder that I can't appreciate the value of the advice... certainly I appreciate the honesty of the author and their willingness to call out what they see as corporate BS, but I found myself putting it down at 50%, 70%, 80%, picking up later, forging on, and still not feeling I was getting much from the read.

Written by the well known Ben Horowitz (VC of FB, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter), this is Ben's narration as a HARDCORE entrepreneur.
What I LOVE about the book:
- There is no black or white in the world of startup entrepreneurship. It's always a shade of grey.
- The roller coaster ride of an entrepreneur & how SIMILAR it feels to all our journeys. This book is a GREAT leveller 🙂
- Profanity is a mindset. Ben narrates how he handles it (also mentioning its purpose)
- Co-Founder relationship management!
- The constant dread of shutting down / going bankrupt and how the single pointed agenda of SURVIVING pulled Ben and his Company through until stardom.
- When to use statistics and when to use calculus 🙂
- The incredible story of Go. (second time I read this)
- The CHALLENGES of 'getting big Co execs into small Cos"!
- NEVER 'overcompensating' employees
Immortal quotes:
"There were plenty of companies in the '90s that had launch parties but not landing parties" 🙂
"Play long enough ... so that you might get lucky"
MUST READ (once a year)

Reviewed in India on February 24, 2019
Written by the well known Ben Horowitz (VC of FB, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter), this is Ben's narration as a HARDCORE entrepreneur.
What I LOVE about the book:
- There is no black or white in the world of startup entrepreneurship. It's always a shade of grey.
- The roller coaster ride of an entrepreneur & how SIMILAR it feels to all our journeys. This book is a GREAT leveller 🙂
- Profanity is a mindset. Ben narrates how he handles it (also mentioning its purpose)
- Co-Founder relationship management!
- The constant dread of shutting down / going bankrupt and how the single pointed agenda of SURVIVING pulled Ben and his Company through until stardom.
- When to use statistics and when to use calculus 🙂
- The incredible story of Go. (second time I read this)
- The CHALLENGES of 'getting big Co execs into small Cos"!
- NEVER 'overcompensating' employees
Immortal quotes:
"There were plenty of companies in the '90s that had launch parties but not landing parties" 🙂
"Play long enough ... so that you might get lucky"
MUST READ (once a year)


1. I recently met an ex-colleague, whose founded and runs a business now valued over a couple of billion dollars. He like the author said that we just kept on going through tough times. As Winston Churchill also said, when in hell keep going. And as the author says, if you play long enough, you may get lucky.
2. Focus on exploiting your strengths more than in ensuring that there are no weaknesses
3. Sometimes the things that you are not doing should be the things that you should be doing.
4. Looking at worlds from different prisms, helps separate facts from perception or shall we say fiction.
5. In war time, just play to survive, kill and win i.e., know what needs to be done and focus on getting it done. Alignment of all with the strategy and tactics is very important.
6. If you are a thinker, get people who can get things done. My father used to say that most executive often knew how to get things done, however if they also knew what to do, then they would be more effective.
7. In business if you need to find an answer, you got to find it irrespective of odds of finding it.
8. Importance of training your people and integrating them. As i was old over a quarter of a century ago in an interview, you need to train your staff from day one.
There are of course other lessons too, like when should you sell your company, how should organisation culture be deigned, how should a founder deal with simple things like title or avoid the organisation becoming political, etc. I am sure, depending on where you are and what your challenges are, you will have a different take.
A good book to read for entreprenuers, for people charting their own courses. I give it my highest recommendation.

The first half of the book mainly covers Horowitz's back story and it takes a while for anything of real value to be mentioned. By the halfway mark though the book offers plenty of bookmark-worthy snippets of advice which should be relevant to anyone who is looking to develop a career in leadership.
It's very likely I will be referring to this book again in the future.