Book of the Week: The Hard Things About Hard Things
04 Jan 2015
Ben Horowitz is half of the VC firm, Andressen Horowitz. He was previously the CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud) and worked with Marc Andressen, the founder of Netscape. This is a book written by a CEO for other CEOs. Ben has a popular blog, so you may recognize some things, but he goes into more of the backstory behind those ideas. The trend is to turn blogs into books. This is not a business book, because there are no formulas to being a CEO. Being a CEO is hard. The initial phases are easy when you’re building things. Things get hard when you hit the market and things don’t go the way you expected. This isn’t a book that you can summarize easily since there are so many hard things. If you want a taste, you can watch an interview Ben gave at the Stanford about nailing the hard things. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2e3RqL4VWs&w;=560&h;=315] Transparency
- Trust
- The more brains working on the hard problems, the better
- A good culture is like the old RIP protocol: Bad news travels fast: good news travels slow.
Being transparent is important, because it build trust. If there is not trust, then communication breaks down. One of the difficult things about scaling a company is communication. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. If you are open about your problems, you will have a largest set of your employees thinking about those problems. Larry Page posted a memo in the kitchen about how the AdWords engine sucked. Some engineers not on the AdWords team fixed the problem. The faster you know about problems, the faster you can fix it. Lack of Weakness, Not Strength When you hire by committee, you end up with candidates that lack weaknesses instead of having strengths. When assembling a team, you are the sum of your strengths, not your weakness. A CEO sometimes needs to make that executive decision to hire based on strength. Her I have noticed the increased use of female pronouns in recent books. Ben uses her when referring to the engineer, entrepreneur, etc. I try to write things as gender neutral, but maybe I should just use her to swing things that way. Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits—in that order The only reason person stays when things go bad is that they like their job. The reasons people quit besides money is because they hate their manager or they aren’t learning anything. Law of Crappy People
For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.
Ben writes a lot about people in his book and gave a talk for the How to Start a Startup Class at Stanford on demotions and raises. Courage
“I tell my kids, what 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 what he’s go to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you do what you do, not how you feel.” - Cus D’amato, Legendary Boxing Trainer
When you say things you think the VCs want to hear, you lose authenticity and respect. You need to courage to say that you believe in things that other people don’t. This is what makes your company valuable. A CEO needs courage. Sometimes the right thing to do is obvious, but you need the courage to do it. Bill Campbell I’ve heard whispers of Bill Campbell before the Apple wage fixing lawsuit. Ben talks about Bill Campbell a lot. He’s someone you want on your side to either pull strings in the background or celebrate the good times with. He is both the light and the dark. He is the person you when things are going well and the person you want when things are going bad. Wartime CEO vs Peacetime CEO Ben has a blog post about wartime CEOs vs peacetime CEOs. Most books about management are written for peacetime conditions. Different things needed when you company is on the edge of failure. Ben taken on both roles. No Recipe I spend a lot of timing reading business books. One reason is that I am looking for recipes, but life is more complicated that what recipes can cover. The only way is to just do it and see what happens. Just make sure you can fix stuff quickly before the boat sinks and maybe avoid some of minefields that Ben has pointed out.