The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Book Rating: 2 of 5

The Hard Thing About Hard Things is Ben Horowitz book about doing business things. I read the THTAHT because I was on a recommended reading list at work. I had never before heard of Ben Horowitz but I did have some inkling that he was related to some VC firm. I confess I don’t know much about Venture Capital but I learned after reading the book that Ben was a good friend of Mark Andreessen who was the “young genius” at netscape. Ben and Mark founded Andreessen Horowitz and made a lot of money by investing early on in companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Ben’s book is a bit of a navel gaze as Ben recounts his experience leaving SGI to join Netscape pre-IPO then go on to found Loud Cloud. Ben eventually gave up on Loud Cloud’s datacenter business and spun out its software assets into a new company called OpsWare which he eventually sold it HP for a big pile of money ($1.6B).

Ben is one part humble and one part arrogant. I found the book easy to read but light on actually useful content. There was some talk about “war time” and “peace time” CEO which I guess made an impact on executives where I work because they seem to like to use these terms. To me this advice was not actionable and felt like a bunch of self aggrandizement by Ben.

I think part of what taints my opinion of Ben and his book is I worked in IT in the early 2000’s when OpsWare was a product. Although I never used OpsWare my experience with products like it was they were universally crap. Sold to executives to desperate to solve their problems with a product when really they needed to properly invest in staff and leadership. Sort of like the “It Works” wrap. Sure it will squish your fat around but it doesn’t actually make you skinny. Eventually OpsWare was placed in the dust bin of IT history. The only reason it sold for $1.6B is because HP was the right combination of desperate and stupid to pay for it. Similar to HP’s trash acquisition of EDS.

I guess Ben has made a lot of money and He did build companies when others didn’t. The book he wrote is easy to read. It doesn’t teach much but it does give you a view into a very rich man’s brain. Maybe this is worth something?