The art of the struggle
These are halcyon days in Silicon Valley and other hives of entrepreneurship around the world. Barely a week goes by without some newly minted billionaire hitting the headlines and some bizarrely named young company getting an eye-wateringly high valuation from financiers. But for every starry success there will be a multitude of failures, and it is easy to forget that the job of an entrepreneur is often nasty, brutish and in danger of being cut short by impatient investors, rebellious co-founders and other hazards.
Sunday Book Review: View From the Top
This how-to management book is a lively, candid account of the lessons Horowitz learned in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the co-founder and chief executive of a cloud services company that thrived, then faltered, then shifted strategies and thrived again before Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2007 for $1.6 billion.
Book Review: 'The Hard Thing About Hard Things,' By Ben Horowitz
Every entrepreneur has experienced what Ben Horowitz terms "the struggle." That's when things are going really, really badly. It's when, as he puts it in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," "people ask you why you don't quit and you don't know the answer." But there always is a way, Mr. Horowitz believes, and it's the ability to spot the next move during the struggle that separates winners and losers.
A Conversation With Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz on the ‘Hard Things’
Ben Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a well-known Silicon Valley venture firm that has invested in Facebook, Foursquare, Box, Jawbone and dozens of highly successful start-ups.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Ben Horowitz’s Honest And Real Take On Entrepreneurship
Imagine your business is down to its last stretch of runway and your investors refuse to put more cash into it. Your friends and your most trusted advisers tell you that it’s probably time to throw in the towel, but as a last-ditch effort to find some capital, you decide to take the company public.
The consigliere of Silicon Valley
Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz has been called high tech's new Andy Grove, the "CEO Whisperer," and "the management guru to all of the young entrepreneurs in the Valley" by none other than Mark Zuckerberg. Reading his new book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, it’s easy to see why.
“The Hard Thing about Hard Things”: The most valuable book on startup management hands down
It’s not a surprise that Ben Horowitz got a book deal, that the book is already getting a flood of press, or that it’ll sell well. Horowitz is one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley right now and has built his following largely through his writing on this blog. A book collecting a lot of these posts was a no brainer for him to pull together and a publisher to commission.
Silicon Valley's Stealth Power
Ben Horowitz, the venture capitalist, is talking about the legends who watch over him in his Menlo Park, Calif., office. On one wall the stern faces of some of the forefathers of computer science -- the likes of Alan Turing and John von Neumann -- stare from inside a row of picture frames. Another wall is reserved for boxing greats: Ali, Frazier, and Foreman, James "Cinderella Man" Braddock, Sugar Ray Robinson, and a handful of others. "It's a little bit of a reminder to myself of what we are looking for in an entrepreneur," Horowitz says. "Great genius and great courage." The genius part is self-evident; without it there would be no Apple or Google or Microsoft. The courage part is less obvious. But Horowitz says no other quality -- not vision, not creativity, not charisma -- is more essential to succeed as an entrepreneur. Building a company is a lot like boxing, he says, and not because of any rush that comes from landing a metaphorical punch on your opponent. Building a company is hard and lonely. It demands relentless focus. And no matter how well you do, you must be ready to be pummeled again and again. "In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain," he says. "And then you fight the next round."
Ben Horowitz on IPOs from hell, the power of profanity, and why he likes a good fight
Before Ben Horowitz built one of the fastest growing venture-capital firms in Silicon Valley’s history, he was a CEO on the perpetual brink of disaster. Loudcloud, the early cloud-computing company Horowitz founded with Marc Andreessen after the sale of Netscape to AOL, nearly went bankrupt when the NASDAQ crashed in 2000. When fundraising proved impossible, Horowitz pursued a controversial initial public offering thatBusinessWeek called "the IPO from hell."
10 Brilliant Business Lessons From Ben Horowitz
Nassim Taleb says that with some books you should read the text and skip the footnotes. Others, read the footnotes and skip the text. With business books, "skip both the text and the footnotes."
Ben Horowitz's new book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is not one of those books.
