Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist whose memoir The Hard Thing About Hard Things offers an unusually honest account of the psychological and operational challenges of founding a company.

Ben Horowitz co-founded Opsware (then called Loudcloud) in 1999, took it public in 2001 just as the dot-com bubble collapsed, navigated a near-death crisis, sold the company to HP for $1.65 billion in 2007, and went on to co-found Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture firms. The Hard Thing About Hard Things draws on that experience with a candor that is unusual in business literature.

The book’s signal virtue is its refusal to offer easy frameworks. Horowitz is not interested in telling readers how to succeed in predictable circumstances; he is interested in what it actually feels like and what it actually requires to lead a company through circumstances that threaten to destroy it. The chapters on managing through crisis, on laying off employees, on the psychology of the CEO facing catastrophic scenarios, are written by someone who has done these things and found them genuinely hard. The honesty is more valuable than most business advice.

The book has real limitations. It is aimed primarily at technology startup founders and CEOs, and readers outside that world may find it less directly applicable than the praise implies. The hip-hop lyric epigraphs that open many chapters are a stylistic choice that divides readers. And Horowitz’s world is Silicon Valley at full tilt, with all the attendant assumptions about speed and scale. But for its intended audience — particularly first-time founders confronting things they did not expect — it is one of the more genuinely useful books in the startup literature.