The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

I listened to this on audiobook. It was the long tale about Ben Horowitz and his adventures with Loudcloud, Opsware, and now the Andressen-Horowitz VC fund. It was so full of information that I found it frustrating. You almost needed to read this in a group and discuss it to absorb everything.

The gist is that being a CEO is just…hard. There aren’t always clear answers, and sometimes, all the options just suck. It’s well-written and reads like a novel in some places.

I really enjoyed how he opened each chapter with a quote from gangsta rap (listening to the narrator trying to do a “black voice” was pretty funny). Interestingly, Horowitz is a white man (Jewish, no less) married to a black woman. Early in the book, he discussed some of his family dynamics, and the only reason I figured his in-laws were black were because the narrator would do a “black voice” when voicing the words of his father-in-law.

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