The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Premise

Most business books sell you a recipe. Do these seven things, follow this framework, copy this culture, and the company you've been dreaming about will scale into something real. The problem with that promise, as Ben Horowitz puts it on page one of his book, is that the moments when you actually need help have no recipe. There's no recipe for telling your board the forecast was a fantasy. There's no recipe for laying off the people who believed in you. There's no recipe for sitting in your house at four in the morning, knowing the company will die on Friday if you can't figure out the move by Thursday afternoon.

The hard thing, Horowitz writes, isn't setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. That sentence is the seed of everything that follows. The book isn't a guide to the parts of running a company you can plan for. It's a guide to the parts you can't, written by a founder who came within weeks of bankruptcy more than once and came out the other side with a sixteen hundred and fifty million dollar exit to Hewlett-Packard.

What makes the book different from the genre is that Horowitz refuses to clean the story up. He tells you what it felt like. He tells you about the cold sweats, the throwing up in the bathroom, the journalist who called his IPO "the IPO from hell," and the morning he had to keep walking into work like nothing was wrong. He laces the chapters with hip-hop lyrics because the artists he quotes—Nas, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Drake—talk plainly about hustling under pressure and refusing to quit. He thinks they're better company for a struggling founder than the airport-bookstore strategists. Rappers, he argues, are entrepreneurs too: they aspire to be great and successful, they compete for money, and they spend a lot of time being misunderstood.