The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
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There’s no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations
Being scared doesn’t mean you’re gutless. What you do matters and will determine whether you will be a hero or a coward
Do not judge things by their surfaces. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all
“Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity” — Colin Powell
The simple existence of an alternative, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce
Whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project
Figuring out the right product is the innovators job, not the customers job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data
Sloppiness is not tolerated
Sometimes the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on
It’s good to ask “what am I not doing?”
Startup ceos should not play the odds. When you are building a company you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chance are nine in ten or one in a thousand; you task is the same
The best skill is the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves
It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO
Keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions
The struggle is where greatness comes from
Don’t put it all on your shoulders. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can
There is always a move
Play long enough and you might get lucky
Don’t take it personally. Everybody makes mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn’t help
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company
Without trust, communication breaks
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust
If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever, because I know whatever you are doing is in my best interests
If I don’t trust you at all, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I do not trust that you are telling me the truth
Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust
The more brains working on the hard problems the better
It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems
A brain cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about
A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems geeky and openly can quickly solve them
Managers must lay off their own people
The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole
Flowers are cheap, divorce is expensive
By doing everything, you may fail at the most important thing
Don’t always think about yourself first. When you are part of a family or part of a group, thinking only of yourself can get you into trouble. Stop being a boy and become a man. Put first things first. Consider people you care about most before considering yourself
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong — when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be?
“If you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble” — Dave Conte
Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself
What would I do if we went bankrupt? Is there a way to do that without going bankrupt?
If you don’t treat the people who leave fairly, the people who stay will never trust you
Only people who have been through awful, horrible, devastating circumstances can give advice
Humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news
There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”
Nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares
All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company
Take care of the people, the products, and the profits-in that order
Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work
In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. In a poor organization, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not
Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong. Things always go wrong. Being a good company is an end in itself
Training is one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform
If you don’t train your people, you establish no basis for performance management
People quit because they hate their manager; generally appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they receive, or they aren’t learning anything: the company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills
The best place to start training is on the knowledge and skill they need to do their job; functional training
Being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat
Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. They take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. They know the context going in and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan. They are not part of the product team; they manage the product team. They crisply define the target, the “what”, and manage the delivery of the “what”. They communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally. They don’t give direction informally. They gather information informally. They create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives. They anticipate serious product flaws and build real solutions. They focus the team on revenue and customers. They define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. They think in terms of delivering superior value to the marketplace during product planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during the go-to-market phase. They decompose problems. They think about the story they want written by the press. They ask the press questions. They assume members of the press and the analyst community are really smart. They err on the side of clarity. They define their job and their success. They send their status reports in on time every week, because they are disciplined
Initiate contact and interaction with your peers and other key people in the organization. Write a report on what you learn from each person
Every executive must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market
Nothing will accelerate your company’s development like hiring someone who has experience building a very similar company at larger scale
“If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low” — Tony Robbins
Interview people that are good at what they do to learn from them what they believe is important and made them good
Giving a team a task that it cannot possibly perform is crippling to the team
Many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience
Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create
People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of
Every really good, really experienced CEO tends to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues
The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area
For engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run a scalable engineering organizations
Knowing how your target customers think and operate, knowing their cultural tendencies, understanding how to recruit and measure the right people in the right regions of the world to maximize your sales — these turn out to be far more valuable than knowing your own company’s product and culture
The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting
The manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening
The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing
You must also take the market before someone else does
If you fail to do both of these things, your culture won’t matter one bit. Culture does not make a company
Why bother with culture at all?
- It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals
- As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work, and help it perform better in the future
- Perhaps most important, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tradgedy if your company culture is such that you don’t even want to work there
When an organization grows in size, things that were previously easy become difficult. Communication, common knowledge, and decision making become big challenges as you grow
The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad
Basic steps to organizational design
- Figure out what needs to be communicated
- Figure out what needs to be decided
- Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths
- Decide who’s going to run each group
- Identify the paths that you did not optimize
- Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five
The purpose of process is communication
The people who are already doing the work in an ad hoc manner should design a process
When developing a process, focus on the output first, then figure out how you’ll know if you are getting what you want at each step, then engineer accountability into the system
Be mindful of your company’s true growth rate as you add architectural components. It’s good to anticipate growth, but it’s bad to overanticipate growth
Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability
The act of judging people in advance will retard their development
Hiring scalable execs too early is a bad mistake
Invest in courage and determination
Focus on what you need to get right and stop worrying about all the things that you do wrong or might do wrong
Generally, someone doesn’t become a CEO unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company
Everything is hard when you don’t actually know what you are doing
Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong
If the CEO can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself
The key to getting to the right outcome was to keep from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative
Techniques to calm your nerves: make some friends, get it out of your head and onto paper, focus on the road, not the wall
Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid
Great CEOs face the pain. Don’t quit
“I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.” — Cus D’Amato
In life, everyone faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly
Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization
Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart
Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself
Great leaders have the ability to articulate the vision, the right kind of ambition, and the ability to achieve the vision
The enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills
In peacetime, leaders must maximize and broaden the current opportunity. The company’s survival in wartime depends upon strict adherence and alignment to the mission
Keys to giving effective feedback: be authentic, come from the right place, don’t get personal, don’t clown people in front of their peers, feedback is not one-size-fits-all, be direct, but not mean
As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything
Say what you think. Express yourself
Life is struggle, so embrace the struggle
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