Book Review: “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”

Selected Quotes and Ideas from the Book

The Difficulty of Being a Startup CEO

• "The hard thing isn't setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal...The hard thing isn't dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare."
• "There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."
• "It's the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO."
• "Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from."
• "As a technology startup from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life."

Building Your Business

• "When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same."
• "Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after awhile. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don't like each other or they become complacent about each other's feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship."
• "[W]hen you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There's no inertia that's putting the company in motion."

Communication

• "In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. Consider the following: If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don't trust you at all, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I do not trust that you are telling me the truth."
• "Perhaps the CEO's most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company."
• "As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust."
• "Don't put it all on your shoulders. It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That's not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won't be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats."
• "A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards--not punishes--people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved."
• "If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is."

The Importance of Training

• "Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat."
• "A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That's silly."
• "Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform." -Andy Grove
• "Take your best people and encourage them to share their most developed skills. Training in such topics as negotiating, interviewing, and finance will enhance your company's competency in those areas as well as improve employee morale. Teaching can also become a badge of honor for employees who achieve an elite level of competence."
• "[N]o startup has time to do optional things. Therefore, training must be mandatory."

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