I almost forgot to write an entry about The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Often, that means that a book was either no good or otherwise inconsequential. In this case, however, I blame the circumstances in which I read it. Our baby was having a hard time sleeping and I would often bring my Kindle with me when I put him to bed. That could take anything from five minutes to two hours so, for a time, I was blazing through dozens of pages each night. I would hold the Kindle in one hand and sooth our child with the other.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things, unwieldy title aside, is something of a modern business classic. It's often included in lists of books that "Every Startup Founder Should Read". CEO hopefuls keep it under their pillow in case some of the wisdom sticks. Ben Horowitz is even more well-known for his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in some of the most successful companies of the past decade such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft. He built his own company, then he helped others build theirs. In a way, Ben Horowitz is the Jay-Z of Silicon Valley.
Horowitz gets a few things right. Per the title, he argues that companies spend too much time worrying about strategy, when most things in business don't lend themselves easily to stale academic study. Sometimes things go wrong and you need to choose between two catastrophic alternatives. Sometimes your company is caught off guard by a sudden market shift. Most management books use hindsight to make everything sound much simpler than it actually was. The hardest decisions are often made after two weeks of sleep deprivation and under extreme stress. Maybe your personal life is just as distressed. Maybe you need to fire your best friend. In the moment, the pressure is much higher than Harvard Business Review case studies let on.
Roughly half of the book describes the story of Opsware, the company founded by Horowitz with Marc Andreessen. The other half is a collection of advice for would-be managers. Some of the advice is genuinely useful: "Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", for example. Sometimes it's actually pretty funny: "If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired 'the best VP in the industry,' I’d be Lil Wayne.". I appreciate the effort that has gone into keeping the message as simple as possible without dumbing down the content. Again, the bar for business books continues to be low, but you could clearly do worse.