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“Take care of the people, the products and the profits — in that order” & other lessons from Ben Horowitz
If you are working, have worked, will work or have a simple interest in the startup world and you haven’t read “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz yet — you’ve just found the next item on your reading list.
Ben Horowitz is one of the founding partners at Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and former CEO and cofounder of Opsware Inc. (originally Loudcloud, a cloud-computing business that was turned into a data center automation software company when the dot-com bubble burst throwing most of its customers into bankruptcy — more here).
Horowitz is a great story-teller, and provides actionable insights from his experience as CEO and coaching tech startup CEOs. If you’ve ever worked in a startup, I bet you’ll find at least one paragraph of this book that incredibly resonates with your experience. Most likely, the entire book will resonate with your experience and will uncover some of the “mystery” behind the art of being a CEO.
Together with ranking amongst my top 5 business reads, “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” is probably the book that I’ve dog-eared the most.
Here are some of the parts that I found most meaningful, and if you think you would have dog-eared them too…
