12/23/2013Horowitz, a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, offers hard-earned business advice and a compendium of the best posts from his popular blog (ben's blog). For the budding tech mogul, this is heady stuff, and politic to heed, as his firm, Andreesen Horowitz, is a nearly $3 billion powerhouse that has invested in winners, including Skype, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and Zynga. But shrewd investing decisions don't make for riveting prose, as Horowitz repeatedly trots out war and military metaphors to describe the struggle to sustain past businesses. Horowitz is far sharper when he's blunt and candid. Admitting that as a CEO he was always scared is far more useful to the aspiring mogul than heading many chapters with hip-hop lyrics describing street corner struggles. Though passages about minimizing office politics and how a startup executive might grow into managing a larger business contain novel insights, most of the useful observations come from citing other titans, including Intel CEO Andy Grove, Intuit head Bill Campbell, and management guru Tony Robbins. This manual reads as a collection of war stories from the 1990s boom-and-bust era blended with platitudes from an older generation of established business leaders. Agent: Amanda Urban. (Apr.)
The Hard Thing About Hard Things- Horowitz, Ben.21
Go big or go home is the prevailing culture in Silicon Valley. This means that entrepreneurs need to figure out how to scale. This is a major challenge since most entrepreneurs have zero experience with scaling something. Ben notes that one of the hardest things to do is get the right people at the right time for your scale. Most of the time people are lured into what he calls the scale anticipation fallacy. CEOs start picking up big name talent in the hopes that they will help the organization rise to the next level. The problem is that these big names are often over-sized for the venture and end up squashing its potential as frustration sets in and eats up precious management energy.
We almost always operate in fuzzy conditions. And that is what makes HealthTech hard. But let us not forget that every requirement you gather, every screen you design, every line of code you write directly impacts a human life. So hard or not, you have real tangible power to make a positive change to a human life if you are genuine about what you are trying to do. And that is what gets us HealthTech nerds out of bed every single day.
Three days into the tour, I received a call from my father-in-law. John Wiley had been through a lot in his 71 years. As a boy, his father was murdered in Texas. In order to survive, he and his mother moved in with an unkind man and his nine children. There, John was abused, made to stay in the barn with the animals, while the other children ate his dinner. Eventually, John and his mother left that cruelty by walking for three days down a dirt road, carrying everything they owned. John would recall that journey in great detail his entire life. As a young man, before finishing his high school education, he left home to fight in the Korean War so that he could support his mother. As a young father of five, he took every job imaginable to support his family, including unloading banana boats and working to build the Alaskan pipeline. He tragically saw two of his children die before he reached the age of 60. He had a hard life and was used to bad news.
After graduating from college and graduate school in computer science, I went back to work for SGI. Being there was a dream come true and I loved it. After my first year at SGI, I met a former head of marketing for the company, Roselie Buonauro, who had a new startup. Roselie had heard about me from her daughter, who also worked with me at SGI. Roselie recruited me hard. Eventually, she got me and I went to work for her at NetLabs.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy AnswersA lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.
Management books typically provide you with a recipe for building a successful company. That works wonders... until you screw up. Is it then that things became hard, really f*****cking hard. And for the hard things in life... there is no recipe.
After a tour of his entrepreneurial life, the remaining of the book is dedicated to "The Struggle", the "hard things" that someone in a leadership position must face, and Ben's way of dealing with them.
The book covers the struggles startup founders have to face on a daily basis, how hard it gets to run a startup when things go wrong and stressful situations arise. At various stages when things get tough, CEOs have to choose between a bad decision and a terrible decision, how nerve-wracking it is for them to make that choice, and how not to surrender under such circumstances. The book contains all kinds of practical knowledge on how to run a startup without giving up and is a must-read for technical entrepreneurs.
Reread after WYDiWYD. Hard thing about hard things is, as with the next book, about taking the hard things in your hands, communicating honesty in business and in life. Horowitz weaves lessons into the story of his time as CEO of Loudcloud, and a great storyteller he is. 9/10. 2ff7e9595c
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