If CEOs were graded on a test, the mean score would be 22 out of 100. Here are suggestions on how to cope with the Struggle and find a way out of it: If you are strong and you can get through the Struggle, you have a fighting chance.

If you are weak and you succumb to the Struggle, you will fail. The Struggle is sleepless lonely nights when you feel you’ve failed everyone who was dumb enough to believe in you.Įvery entrepreneur has gone through the Struggle, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk. The Struggle is when you question why your idiot self ever started a company. The Struggle is when the impending failure of your company swallows every thought and sensation in your waking life. You don’t have the traction you hoped for. Your plans have not lived up to their promise. The sky is open, the possibilities are endless, and success is inevitable. Most people start their companies with boundless enthusiasm. The book covers a wide span of topics, including handling the psychology of a failing company, building a good place to work, scaling a company, and being a good CEO. Write this book to share the major lessons he’d learned in the trenches.Co-found the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which aimed to serve founders like no other VC firm before it.This grueling experiences led him to do two things: Ultimately, he pulled the business around (which had rebranded as Opsware) and sold to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007. As the bubble crashed, the company faced an endless series of existential crises, from running out of money to having their largest customers go bankrupt to facing tough competition. He then co-founded Loudcloud, a cloud computing company, at the height of the bubble in 1999. This book is a collection of advice and first-hand experiences to help company operators deal with the hard times.īen Horowitz began his career at the dawn of the Internet, working at browser and server company Netscape before it sold to America Online. Most business books try to give a recipe for success, but “the hard thing about hard things” is that there is no recipe for those hard situations. The hard part is firing your friends when they no longer fit your company’s goals, it’s staring at impending bankruptcy and throwing your hail mary to save the company. Most of what they discuss-setting audacious goals, constructing a winning strategy, building a cheerful culture-isn’t the hard part of building a company. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Hard Thing About Hard Thingsīen Horowitz isn’t impressed with most business books.

The hard thing about hard