I bought a business book at the bookstore a few days ago, and I read through it. It was a management book, and I was fully prepared to read it the way I always do. I was actively looking for sentences to underline and trying to pick out strategies and frameworks I could use immediately. The title of the book is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the author is Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of the top investment firms in Silicon Valley. I figured a book written by a titan of that level would definitely contain a clear formula for success. But the emotion left inside me after finishing the book was something I truly did not expect. It was not learning but rather pure comfort.
I have read many business books in the past, but this time was quite strange. It was truly ironic to feel healed after reading a management strategy book. The content of the book is not even meant to be healing. It is a book densely packed with the brutal history of Silicon Valley companies facing moments of firings, organizational collapse, depleted funds, betrayal, and bankruptcy. Despite all that, the only thing left in its wake was consolation. This book does not offer a formula for business success. Instead, it reveals the ugly truths that even successful people wanted to hide. And that truth condenses into a single necessary sentence for entrepreneurs who are suffering alone somewhere right at this very moment. It tells you that you are not the only one having a hard time. Before we get into it, this is sadly not a paid advertisement for the book. I just felt a lot while reading it, and I organized my thoughts because I really want to recommend it to you.
The Illusion of the Hidden Answer
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| You can search for it forever. It is simply not there |
Before starting a business, we usually think we can find the right answer if we just learn and experience enough. So we diligently read books, listen to lectures, and hunt down the experiences of successful founders. We act as if there is some hidden path out there that we can discover if we just look hard enough. But the situation shifts entirely once you actually start a business. You clash with your cofounder, your core talent suddenly leaves, your funds dry up, and your investors abruptly change their terms. I do not have a cofounder or investors to clash with yet, but even at my tiny scale, running this blog and QuickLink alongside it, almost nothing has gone the way I originally mapped it out. You desperately dig through all kinds of data, but the right answer is nowhere to be found. Even if you listen to someone else talk about their success, the methods differ from person to person, and the experiences of another company never perfectly apply to your own situation. You comfort yourself by thinking you will do better next time if you just learn more and gain more experience. But the exact same frustration repeats itself when the next crisis hits.
If you find yourself constantly trapped in this cycle of expecting things to get easier and feeling crushed when they do not you should read my piece on The Mindset Mistake That Makes Successful Entrepreneurs Miserable. It breaks down why expecting a smooth ride is the fastest way to destroy your own mental health as a founder.
Walking Without a Map
Ben Horowitz upends the belief we have held onto for our entire lives. The insight is already hidden in the title of the book. Why is a hard thing truly hard? A hard problem is hard because there was never a right answer to begin with. Horowitz divides management problems into two categories. One is the easy problem. How should we structure the org chart? How can we improve the sales process? Where should we allocate the marketing budget for this quarter? These kinds of problems already have proven frameworks and best practices. You can solve them to some extent just by learning, and there are already a hundred books about them sitting on bookstore shelves.
But hard problems do not get solved that easily. How do you demote an executive who has been with you for a long time? How do you lay off half of your company? When is the moment you need to completely pivot the direction of your business? And when is the moment you have to confess your failure to the people who trusted and invested in you? Unfortunately, there is no manual for these types of questions. Business school textbooks and the advice of already successful seniors do not fit perfectly. This is because the context everyone faces is entirely different, there are way too many variables, and the emotions of multiple people are tangled up in the mess.
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| Turns out you were never the problem |
That single sentence, "hard problems are hard because there is no answer," shook my perception to its core. The reason you tossed and turned all night unable to find an answer was not because you were incompetent, but because there was no answer in the first place. You were walking on a path that was not even on the map while blaming yourself for not knowing how to read the map.
The Reality of The Struggle
Horowitz did not figure this out all at once either. He proves this insight through his own most painful experiences. In 2001, Horowitz had to take the company he founded, Loudcloud, public. But the timing was about as bad as it could get. It was right after the dot com bubble burst, and investment sentiment had frozen solid. During that period, when most internet companies were collapsing one after another, Horowitz was put in a difficult position where he had to push forward with going public just to save his company. The crises did not stop there. The service division, which was the core of Loudcloud, had a structure that could not generate profit no matter how many times he recalculated it. Ultimately, Horowitz made the decision to sell the service division, the very body of the company he built, to a company called EDS, and rebuild as an entirely new company using only the remaining software division.
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| This is the man who almost threw up from stress every single day Source: Ben Horowitz |
He vividly describes in the book the moment he had to change the company name, redefine the roles of more than half of his employees, and confess to his investors that he was folding the business he had promised them. The past version of himself he describes is far from the unwavering and stable CEO we commonly imagine. For months he felt like throwing up, could not sleep properly, and had trouble swallowing his food. He even had to get dental treatment because of his habit of clenching his teeth while trying to sleep. He even gives this period its own name. He calls it The Struggle. It is the time when you start doubting why you even started the company, when the worst case scenarios loop endlessly in your head every night, and when people around you ask why you do not just quit, but you do not even know the answer yourself. I recognized a smaller, lower stakes version of that exact feeling in myself while reading. Every time one of my own side projects sat there with zero revenue and nothing but expenses going out, month after month with no real reaction from anyone, I kept quietly wondering if I should just shut it down and stop wasting my time.
Coexisting With the Pain
The book features stories of not just Horowitz but countless other CEOs you know who faced immense obstacles and suffered brutal pain at their office desks rather than in front of the press and media. Someone lost their eyesight, someone lost their family, and most had to suffer from severe mental illnesses. The interesting thing is that the way Horowitz endured this period was far from your typical management mindset. For instance, he confesses that he barely held on by leaning on hip hop music, specifically rap lyrics that sang about hard times. Before becoming one of the most respected investors in the world, he was just a human being who closed his office door, put on his earphones, and desperately held on so he would not collapse.
We usually hold onto this subconscious belief. We think successful people must have escaped the pain the moment their business stabilized. We think that once a company reaches a certain level, there will be room to make confident decisions. But the reality is, the pain of an entrepreneur never goes away. Problems without correct answers will continue to follow you even if your company grows, even if you accumulate experience, and even if you become a millionaire. Only the size and shape of the problems change. The sleepless nights are like a ghost that haunts every entrepreneur for life.
I felt this line the hardest, honestly, because I have caught myself thinking that once QuickLink finally gets its first real users, this constant low grade anxiety would just disappear. Reading Horowitz made me realize it probably will not. It will just change shape into whatever the next problem happens to be.
If you are currently in the middle of this dark tunnel and wondering if the pain is even worth it I highly recommend reading You Will Never Truly Grow Until You Go Through This. It will help you understand why this particular kind of suffering is the only real catalyst for meaningful business growth.
This book tells you there are no right answers, but it never tells you to give up. You have to let go of the idea that you need to eliminate the pain, or that something is wrong just because it is this hard. It is actually normal for the pain to be extreme. A painful night where you cannot find your bearings is proof that you are doing something genuinely difficult right now. If you accept this, the energy you spent on guilt and self doubt until yesterday can be redirected toward making your next decision. You have to make a decision anyway, and you must make the best move based on your current conditions and information.
Stop looking for the cause in the wrong places to try and eliminate the pain. It is better to coexist with the pain and learn how to make the best judgment right in the middle of it. The book does not give you a way to remove the pain, but it offers a few insights on how to find the best move while suffering through it. I think those insights will be helpful if you read the book yourself. The pages are filled with stories that break common sense and intuition. Many CEOs and founders have already drawn a lot of strength from this book, and it definitely helped me look at my own work differently, despite all the management books I have read before. I highly recommend you pick it up and see for yourself.
The pain of building something real will never truly leave you, but realizing you are not bleeding alone changes absolutely everything.
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