The Hard Thing About Hard Things

What is a book on leadership that you recommend?

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is a pretty good one.

He's a good mentor of mine.

What's the one question you ask in every job interview?

So highly recommend that book.

And I'm also currently rereading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which I actually read when we were starting TrustFed.

And I thought it was relevant then and it feels even more relevant now.

But I'm slowly as a business owner learning to accept that you cannot... engineer your way out of difficulty or challenges that it's just it's part of the job and it's just hard and you just have to suffer through it.

And, uh, though I dunno how that looks in churn, but, you know, there were periods where there was particularly high churn and, you know, sometimes we've had to make redundancies and things like that, so, uh, which is always painful, but-

But I think it's a really interesting point is there's, there's a great book, um, uh, uh, by a guy called Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and he always talks about people do work...

People are great in roles for the time that you need in that organization at the time-

Yeah.

This is the second half of a review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

If you have not met him yet, Horowitz built a company called LoudCloud straight into the dot-com collapse, took it public when the market wanted nothing to do with technology, sold it six years later for $1.6 billion and then founded the venture capital firm and reason Horowitz.

He wrote the book while he still remembered exactly how the bad years felt and that it was what makes it worth your time.

So three things.

Get the book.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

The link is in the show notes.

Read it beside a book about somebody winning because this one is about surviving and you need both to see the whole picture.

I read this book.

It's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, initially in 2020.

And I read this book at such an important part of my life where I had to make some really hard business decisions.

I had to fire some people who were really good friends.

Another way that I think about seasons is you have peacetime and wartime.

Ben Horowitz talked about this in his book, A Hard Thing About Hard Things, and that's essentially, okay, you have peacetime, which is like things are going well.

People are buying your products.

It's easy to do things in the business.

Yeah.

hostage negotiator that's why it's never split the difference because you can't split a human in two it is fantastic and I think in leadership there's so many ways to have conversations not just on salary level but so many ways and it really helps you equip you for that and think about it in a few different angles and maybe a third one that I like Yeah, Mark Andresen wrote a good book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Ben

Horowitz is part of it.

Step one, I read two books.

The first book I read is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, one of my favorite books of all time.

It's an honest and brutal book about leading a software company, right? What is it like to lead a team of people building a piece of software? How to make decisions, how to prepare yourself for the challenges ahead.

This is not theory.

The distance between those two moments is the subject of today's episode.

The book is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

Every founder I know has been somewhere inside that distance.

Most of them go quiet about it, and the ones who try to describe it find the language missing.

Here is the first lesson, the struggle.

The most honest sentence I have read in a business book comes on the first page of this one.

That's the hard thing about hard things.

There is no formula for dealing with them.