The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
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The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls.
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
This brings us to the question of succession. Since most organizations are run by Ones and have a team of Twos (sometimes Functional Ones) reporting to them, replacing the CEO can be extremely tricky. Do you promote someone from the executive staff even though they are likely a Two? Microsoft did this in 2000 when they replaced Bill Gates, a protot
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But, what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you grow your company tenfold, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sal
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“What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
ON EXPECTATIONS AND…
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Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
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In order to prevent the internal degeneration mentioned earlier, it’s important to be aware of the above issues and then employ appropriate countermeasures to make sure they don’t metastasize.
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: They tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues. If faced with giving everyone the same bonus to make things easy or with sharply rewarding performance and ruffling many feathers, they’ll ruffle the feathers. If given the choice of cutting a popular
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Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More important, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader…
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