Where to Start with Ben Horowitz: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Ben Horowitz — how to approach The Hard Thing About Hard Things, his essential book on building and leading startups. A complete reading guide.
By Marcus Webb
Ben Horowitz (born 1966) is the American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential technology investment firms in the world. Before founding a16z with Marc Andreessen, Horowitz was CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which he founded, took public during the dot-com bust, and sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. His book The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) is widely considered the most honest and practically useful account of startup leadership ever written.
Where to Start: The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014)
The essential Horowitz — and the startup leadership book most likely to be useful when things go wrong. The book’s premise is stated in the title: the hard things about running a company are the situations where no available choice is good, where the standard frameworks don’t apply, and where you have to make a consequential decision with incomplete information and then live with the consequences.
Horowitz structures the book around the crises he actually faced at Loudcloud and Opsware: nearly missing payroll during the dot-com bust; laying off most of the company while the stock was collapsing; having his best engineering VP quit three months before a critical product launch; facing a board that wanted to sell the company at a price he considered deeply undervalued. These accounts are specific, emotionally honest, and genuinely instructive in a way that case studies written after the fact typically are not.
The management frameworks that emerge from these experiences address the situations that most management books avoid:
- How to determine whether to fire a senior executive who is struggling (the ‘who would you hire to replace them?’ test)
- How to manage your own psychology through a company crisis
- The difference between ‘wartime CEO’ and ‘peacetime CEO’ behaviour, and when each is appropriate
- How to conduct layoffs with dignity
- How to handle the employee who was great at one stage but cannot scale to the next
The book is leavened throughout by hip-hop lyrics that Horowitz uses as section epigraphs — an idiosyncratic and genuinely effective device for grounding abstract management advice in the visceral.
Reading Ben Horowitz
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is his essential book. His follow-up What You Do Is Who You Are (2019) addresses company culture through historical case studies and is a strong second read. Both are standalone.
For the full Ben Horowitz bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Ben Horowitz author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Ben Horowitz?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) is the essential starting point — Horowitz's account of founding and running Opsware through the dot-com bust and its eventual acquisition by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion, combined with practical management advice for startup founders dealing with genuinely difficult situations. One of the most honest and practically useful startup books written; widely cited in Silicon Valley as the most useful book on the realities of founding a company.
What is The Hard Thing About Hard Things about?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things presents the startup experience without the survivorship bias that distorts most entrepreneurship memoirs — Horowitz writes about the times he nearly missed payroll, the layoffs he had to conduct, the key employees who quit at the worst moments, the investors who wanted to fire him, and the decisions that had no good options. Interspersed with these personal accounts are practical frameworks for the situations most startup books don't address: how to demote a loyal employee, how to manage your own psychology through a crisis, how to figure out whether to sell the company.
Is the book relevant to managers outside Silicon Valley startups?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is primarily written for startup founders and early-stage company leaders, and its specific examples (venture capital dynamics, technology company contexts, Silicon Valley culture) are drawn from that world. The management frameworks — particularly on wartime versus peacetime CEO leadership, on hiring and firing senior executives, and on maintaining your own psychology through extreme pressure — are applicable to managers in other contexts. The book is widely read outside the startup world by managers who want honest accounts of difficult leadership situations.
What should I read after The Hard Thing About Hard Things?
After The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Horowitz's What You Do Is Who You Are (2019) examines company culture through historical case studies. Andrew Grove's High Output Management (which Horowitz credits as foundational to his management thinking) is the essential companion text. Brad Feld's Venture Deals explains the investment dynamics Horowitz describes from the other side. Phil Knight's Shoe Dog provides another founder memoir with comparable honesty.
