Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben deals with the struggle, loneliness and unsecurity CEOs experiment when building and scaling organizations. The book covers the dark side of leading: politics, death spiral,... It does not depict an ideal world but the honest truth of organizations It truly helps you prepare for the hardship of leading As an entrepreneur I have personally experienced a few of the situations and I would have loved to read it a few years ago

I absolutely loved this book. Unlike the majority of business books which are full of fluff and simplistic linear strategies for a non-linear and messy business journey, this book tells it like it is and provides very valuable lessons for new and even seasoned CEOs, laying out the logic supporting the advice every step of the way. I especially loved the distinction between being a Peacetime and Wartime CEO. Read it!

Many business books present a Pollyanna view of the world, where if you just follow their 10-step formula, the sun will shine, the birds will sing, and everyone will live happily ever after in your fairy-tale company. The real world is not like that, of course, and it's refreshing to get a frank and honest account from someone who has more battle scars than most of us.

Ben does a great job of highlighting the messy real world experience of an entrepreneur with many of the stories that you would never read about in a bio or hear in a conference talk as CEOs market themselves (or stroke their own egos) with tales of past glories and their own brilliance.

Being an entrepreneur is ridiculously hard and can be terrifying emotionally as you live and die with things beyond your control. This book brings those elements to light while also highlighting some of the important cultural and decision-making elements that you can control and that will improve the chance of succeeding.

The life that Ben describes in his book is nothing short of an action packed professional career as CEO. The description of the challenges that he faced in his day to day operations as CEO was scary. Just boils down to the fact that how hard a blow can you take and still keep going.

This book is not for the faint hearted for sure, and not everybody will be able to relate to it. Most of the things didn't make sense to me because I haven't been in those kind of situations in my life that Ben (and perhaps every CEO) has been through. Although Ben has repeatedly emphasized that there are no readymade answers to difficult problems that one faces in her professional career, he has pretty much laid out the blueprint for dealing with the typical challenges.

I am sure it will strike a chord with everyone who is an aspiring CEO or somebody who is already going through the grind. I think the book will stay in my bookshelf until life throws me in to "CEO situation" and then I will surely come back to pick the nuggets of wisdom lying all around in this book.

Very well thought out book. The message was very clear. The world is full of obstacles. You must build relationships with those that are striving to be great. Surround yourself with knowledgeable people and sleep only when you are dead. Give it your all while you are alive and well. But also love others. They can be the key to your success.

This was a really interesting book about the challenges of CEOs and business owners. Most of the author's experiences are with larger, technology companies, but the lessons and stories are applicable for all businesses.

I fully enjoyed reading this book. Ben's book presents a breathtaking entrepreneurial experience with plenty of tips & tricks which might prove very useful if you intend to have your own company. If you don't intend to start your own business or if you are not interested at all in entrepreneurship then this book is not for you.

Read it if you are having a leadership position or it would appear to be a lot of concepts and details to you. Overall, reading this book is very helpful to shape a good mentality of creating a startups and leading a mature organization.

Only halfway through and it's already got more insights than I could have asked for in a book! Thank you Ben! The lessons as a founder, CEO, manager are spot on! Do wish there's more coverage on those who got 'hurt' in the process to success.

Very candid, eye opening book about the nature of management. Horowitz is very open about his experiences and emotions during his career as a CEO and thus is able to present advice that is not common to many management books. Most of his advice, however is for executives who already has a company to run. Therefore do not buy this book in planning your next venture. However if you are already in an semi-established company, regardless of your position this book will be of great help.

Definitely one of the best business books I've read. It takes a very down-to-earth approach to describing a lot of tough issues that you find yourself in when managing a company (or a team within a company), and attempts to provide practical advice. There's no sugar coding to a lot of the hard things that happen when you try to run a business. You can tell that Ben Horowitz really has been there, and as a personal coach, he tells you it's OK to feel sick to your stomach and completely out of your league, then gives you suggestions on how to stay afloat. I can see myself going back to certain chapters of this book over time.

Support programmers tend to be extremely leery of software hype - form magic bullet claims to promises of wonderful, solid feature sets. They realize that the hype (and fancy user interfaces) usually go on before the quality goes in, and many have been burned working excessive hours isolating bugs.

The first half of this book gives examples of how and why the competitive software industry works as it does. For the frustrated support programmer who has to deal with the end result - it is an articulate portrayal from the CEO's point of view. As such, it is a very good aid in understanding why the market is as it is.

The second half of this book consists of a bunch of shallow CEO platitudes (which, no doubt, reflect reality from the CEO point of view). For instance, the author touts the value of performance reviews. In my experience, in large organizations, these are (more often than not) political perception barometers.

If you can get past the CEO blather about how they have it so hard (despite all that over compensation - which isn't mentioned), the first half of the book is well worth reading for those trying top understand the software industry and its upper management mindset.

Writing about entrepreneurship and startups may be challenging. Try to be prescriptive - and you might end up with yet another superficial book that is good for nothing. If you spice it up with stories and case studies - it might become a fluffy manifest that can easily be read as an irrelevant, egocentric manifesto.
Ben Horowitz manages to do what very few business books I know managed to do: to find the way to be authentic yet useful. Interesting yet practical.

A lot was written about this book. It's enough to follow @pmarca on Twitter to understand how many people this book managed to touch. It's a real gift.

This is a unique and EXCELLENT management book. Unlike most books in the genre, it's not just 'dream big'. It's offers really practical information and guidance. I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

Ben's writing is fun, honest and educating, all at the same time. As Ben mention few times in the book, there are no books about failure or the hard parts of a company's struggle. Topics like war time vs peace time CEO's are so true.

Interesting book, telling stories about competition from the inside at high levels between tech companies and their strategies that hooked me immediately. I was riveted from the get go. Horowitz is right, the hard things about business are not the ones you see from the outside.

Outstandingly written leadership book. Easily on a level with Ram Charan, Peter Drucker, and others who write for the real world. Logical in flow, no holds barred approach to leading in good times and bad. Read a library book first then went out and bought a copy as there is so much wisdom inside this book that it will serve as an excellent reference guide for years to come. The examples are time-based, the wisdom timeless.

This book offers deep first hand insights from arguably one of the most clear thinking minds in silicon valley. Even if you disagree with some of his views, you walk away with the intensity of the decisions founders and CEOs have to make. It tells you why Founders are different - even if you start out as a 'normal' person the experience of founding and running a company will change you. The book rings true.

A practical book about the inside workings of a growth company. Has personal lessons from a senior manager on how he approached the different challenges of growth. You might not agree with all of them but if you are building a growth company you will certainly be challenged and will learn by reading this book.

The tumultuous journey sheds a light on how difficult it is to get your company off the ground,even if you dream of the perfect exit when everything should be going easy. But the author stood the ground with Opsware which is not an easy matter

The books contains many practical advice regarding management, and quite a few examples on how the author made decisions as an entrepreneur. Never been an entrepreneur myself, I still find this book very inspiring for managers in bigger companies, if that bigger company still fights and values innovation as a start-up.

I've read all the business books written around Internet, entrepreneurship, start ups and all of tech giants out there (Google, Apple etc) and all of them have taught me something. But only a few of them ahve a made a lasting impression (Good to Great, Zero Gravity, New New Thing) and the 'The Hard Thing About Hart Things' is definitely part of that category. I've read it twice and has provided me with answers to questions that have been on my mind for the last 15 years during which I have been involved in starting up, running and growing three different internet start ups. This book is a real asset and therefore a must read.

Thanks for writing this book Ben Horowitz!

The first half was about the author's prior experiences and the second half was all the tips he has based on topic category. I would say 50% biography and 50% self help tips book. I still enjoyed it greatly.

If you are a tech CEO, recommend reading "The Obstacle is the Way" first, then right into Ben Horowitz's humble and sometimes self-deprecating account of his journey. Much thanks BH for putting these words down! Kudos to author and master podcaster Tim Ferris for both book recommendations.

I liked the way the writer described the issues he faced till he braught his company to Sale.
The stories he mentions are breath taking. It keeps making you want to continue reading.
The experience gained from the book is very comprehensive. Learned a lot from it.

"The struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The struggle has no mercy" Ben's notes on "Struggle" is hard hitting poetry that leaves you with much thought and it forces you to reflect on one's life journey. He writes about his days with such honesty that is perhaps rarely seen. His humanity comes through on his passage when he talks about "letting people go". The memoir leaves you spellbound and is a "thriller" till the end!

The book starts great but slowly transforms into becoming a management textbook. The anecdotes provided are all great but seemed a bit repetitive towards the end. However, if you are a CEO missing this book would be a crime!!!

Ben Horowitz has plenty of entertaining and educational stories about his start as a CEO. He focuses on tough times in his company the "hard things" which is a refreshingly real and helpful take for gaining an appreciation of the real struggle of being a CEO or generally a leader in tough times. I will remember many parts of this book for a long time. Worth reading for future or current business (profit or non-profit) leaders.

Really enjoyed this one. Ben Horowitz is open and candid about his ups and downs in running a company. The successful actions and lessons, that he's learned and passed along, are valuable for anyone running a business. This guy's tough, but he has a big heart -- a rare and valuable commodity in today's world.

The book starts great but slowly transforms into becoming a management textbook. The anecdotes provided are all great but seemed a bit repetitive towards the end. However, if you are a CEO missing this book would be a crime!!!

Ben Horowitz has plenty of entertaining and educational stories about his start as a CEO. He focuses on tough times in his company the "hard things" which is a refreshingly real and helpful take for gaining an appreciation of the real struggle of being a CEO or generally a leader in tough times. I will remember many parts of this book for a long time. Worth reading for future or current business (profit or non-profit) leaders.

Really enjoyed this one. Ben Horowitz is open and candid about his ups and downs in running a company. The successful actions and lessons, that he's learned and passed along, are valuable for anyone running a business. This guy's tough, but he has a big heart -- a rare and valuable commodity in today's world.

Ben tells some wonderful war stories, particularly unvarnished, from some very high stress environments. Based on the stuff he went through, it makes me feel like when I encounter those things I can do the same.

There are many management theories about how to do "insert cliche'd management task here"....but how many books tell you stories about "Demoting a loyal friend".

There were so many stories in here that were straight gut checks. I feel uncomfortable just reading it, much less living it.

Love it!

Pretty straightforward and candid advice from someone who's evidently confronted some of the hardest things anyone can imagine in the course of running a business. More CEOs should write books like this.

This read more like a personal biography than a how-to book. I would recommend the book for anyone who leads a company, as there are many interwoven anecdotal gems. On the flip-side, Horowitz gears the book towards millennials and takes issue with anyone older than himself. Through all of the editing, he tries hard not to make the book about himself, but in the end, it's another self promotion book touting his "Hail Mary" comeback and he and his wise cronies have become the new self-elected trustees of Silicon Valley: i.e., the self-appointed, self-absorbed, mavericks who think they are the first to cover these topic.

Ben Horowitz's advice is extremely accurate and has provided me a lot of insights especially when I worked as a PM.

That said, nearly the entire book is collections of his blog posts. If you're already an avid reader of his blog, I would skip the book as it doesn't provide much new content.

Together with Control your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will, this is the best business book that I have ever read. This should be compulsory reading for the founder and management team of a start up. Like Ben, I have been involved with a number of start ups and no formal education prepares you for the challenges of a start up. I have advised the founder of every company that I am involved with to read this book - it's more valuable than an MBA.

The hard things to Horowitz are the people things, like motivation, loyalty, fairness, and quite a few more. He addresses them first with stories of his experience, then finding a principle in that experience. What Horowitz calls the hard things, others call the soft stuff, meaning people issues rather than production, content, or technique. Schwartzkopf was agreeing with the author when the general said "the soft stuff is harder than the hard stuff."

Entrepreneurship is tough, and this book gives you a glance of how tough it is. Not just today, tomorrow, or for a few months.
As Rocky Balboa says : "it's not about how hard of a hit you can give... it's about how many you can take, and still keep moving forward."
Should you choose this path be prepared to box for a pretty long time !