Da Facto: Hard Thing about Hard Things

Monday, February 23, 2015

Hard Thing about Hard Things

The current book list is pretty analytics focused, but I have ben reading some of the startup books that folks recommend. First one: Joe Zawadzki (founder of x+1 and MediaMath) called out "The Hard Thing about Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz. Ben is a founder in the VC firm Andreessen/Horowitz. He was the CEO of LoudCloud and Opsware and has great experience building big companies, relatively quickly.

I liked the book, but Ben has a perspective that is obviously driven from his experience. And Ben's experiences are a bit rarified. He was running B2B infrastructure companies and talks about needing to raise (and then spend) $100MM to ramp the businesses. Also, he had enviable advisors. Micheal Orvitz, Bill Campbell to name drop a two. But he also had to deal with serious threats to the business. Regardless, I would recommend the read. Short version, don't give up. There are going to be very hard times. As a CEO you need to be prepared for the hard times. He leaves the "how" as an exercise for the reader (I think he would say that every situation is different and you need to find your own path for your particular hardship), but the book provides plenty of food for thought.

I will also say that this is the only business book I have read twice. I aspire to build not just a company, but a team, as influential as Ben. I have promised myself that when we hit 50MM in revenue, I will read it again. And I read Ben's blog. He just did a piece on "The Prophets of Rage" as a prototypical personality in a company. I know several PoR from both Turner and AOL. Given my time as a sound engineer with Public Enemy, this piece resonated with me in both name and content.

As an aside, I saw an Amazon reviewer ding the book on use of the female pronoun. I did the same thing for my dissertation. One comment: Be the change you want to see.

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