The Hard Thing About Hard Things
A 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. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser).
Stats for nerds
124recommend
230mentions
197people
2014–2026years
63% recommend35% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > the moment I realized it's a kind of cloud OS
The foundation of this is thirty years old:
Mark Andreesen founded a company to do what Amazon did: Loudcloud. This was cloud computing, BEFORE AWS was public. Loudcloud was founded in the nineties; AWS opened its APIs in 2006.
Loudcloud failed and became Opsware. Opsware was server automation.
Its competitor was Bladelogic.
Luke Kanies, from BladeLogic, founded Puppet. Puppet was open source, and steamrollered over nearly every installation of BladeLogic and Opsware in existence, because you can’t beat free.
Folks from BladeLogic migrated to jobs at DCOS.
DCOS was steamrollered by Kubernetes, the same way Puppet steamrollered BladeLogic.
The author of the piece predicts that open weight models will steamroller everything next.
I fear he’s right.
I worked for Opsware and BladeLogic.
I watched it happen in real time.
Financially, Andreesen’s wealth stems from Opsware. He is known for Mosaic, but Opsware put him on the map, financially. HP bought them.
If one wants to follow in Andreesen’s footsteps, study how he did it at Opsware.
Conveniently, there is a book.
“The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”
- Some of the business books that I always keep within easy reach of my desk:
- High output management
- The hard thing about hard things
- The Great CEO Within
- Who - a method for hiring
(I've also bought and given away multiple copies of each of these books.)
- Good idea.
* "Billion Dollar Loser" by Reeves Wiedeman (WeWork) * "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (Theranos) * "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson (his failed projects) * "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz - 51. The Dream Machine - A deep dive into the history of computing.
52. Mindstorms by Seymour Papert - Groundbreaking work on computers in education.
53. Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles - The Apollo Guidance Computer.
54. Build by Tony Fadell - Memoir and innovation lessons.
55. Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy - Punic Wars and Carthage's fall.
56. Making PCR - The story of polymerase chain reaction development.
57. Moonwalking with Einstein - Memory training and championship.
58. The Rickover Effect by Theodore Rockwell - First nuclear-powered submarine.
59. The Idea Factory - Bell Labs and American innovation.
60. Hackers by Steven Levy - History of computer hackers.
61. Fire in the Valley - Personal computing revolution.
62. Monk in the Garden - Life of Gregor Mendel.
63. Leadership Moment - Lessons from leaders in crises.
64. The Man Who Discovered Quality - W. Edwards Deming and quality management.
65. Eccentric Orbits - Iridium satellite network's rescue.
66. The Road to Character - Human nature and moral development.
67. The Spy and the Traitor - Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky's story.
68. Billion Dollar Spy - Cold War espionage.
69. Skunk Works - Lockheed's F-117 and SR-71 programs.
70. Working by Robert Caro - Insights into Caro's research.
71. The Wager by David Grann - 18th-century British maritime disaster.
72. Caro's LBJ Series - Biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.
73. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry history.
74. The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf - Alexander von Humboldt's contributions.
75. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - Theranos scandal.
76. Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson - Memoir and business insights.
77. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz - Leadership lessons.
78. Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman - WeWork's rise and fall.
79. Tuxedo Park - Invention of radar during WWII.
80. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
- +1 on the Gimlet media.
Also reading Scott Belsky's "The messy middle" let me match a lot of my experience.
I tried to read "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal" but didn't have the energy/stomach.
Re a16z - "The hard thing about hard things" is not bad either.
However I think a frequent series short stories over a large period of time, would make for much better content.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
This is probably one of the best
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight. A great read about the struggles of how Nike started. But was left unsatisfied as the book ends with the company going public but doesnt cover its ascension in the late 80s/90s and how that went down.
