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

The book’s first segment is primarily devoted to Horowitz’s biography. He offers multiple vignettes from his early years to establish his identity in the reader’s mind. He comes from a politically-liberal family with card-carrying communists among his ancestors, and he grew up in Berkeley, California, a city historically associated with leftist ideologies and free thought. Horowitz illustrates this perspective by mentioning an act from his boyhood: befriending an African American peer. He builds on the idea of not judging people by appearances via a story about his first date with his future wife. These remembrances are meant to set the stage for the bulk of the segment that covers Horowitz’s work experience in the technology sector.

It becomes apparent early in the narrative that technology is a volatile industry, one in which priorities shift on a daily basis and the work hours are grueling. Although Horowitz makes the move to Netscape quite early in his career, the pace of his new environment is no less frantic than in his old workplace; in fact, the pressure to perform is even greater. All these early stories emphasize the theme of Adapting to Change. Standing still in any industry still in its infancy only translates to failure. The ability to pivot quickly becomes Horowitz’s principal means of survival as he recounts the rise and fall of the dot-com industry in the late 1990s.

Initially, Horowitz is faced with the same challenge as every other software developer in Silicon Valley: His company must make a better product than the competition and bring it to market quicker. The frantic pace needed to do either is obvious. However, adding to these pressures are external forces that impact the company’s survival. Microsoft’s desire to monopolize the web browser field leads to unfair practices that attempt to drive Netscape out of business. As Horowitz will illustrate at multiple points in the book, adapting to change spells the difference between a company’s death and its survival. Product innovation is only part of the winning formula—financial innovation becomes critical as well. Selling Netscape to AOL offers a temporary fix to the problem, but even greater difficulties lay ahead. Indeed, as soon as one problem is solved, another arises, reinforcing the theme of the need to be ready to change and adapt in an instant.

Launching LoudCloud creates a period of accelerated growth, and venture capital is easy to find. Horowitz, however, incurs a large load of debt just as the dot-com bubble is about to burst. The market crash in 2000 causes numerous tech companies to go bankrupt and exposes LoudCloud to the same risk. Once again, adapting to change requires Horowitz and his team to consider innovative options. Offering public stock at a time when most other dot-coms are struggling to stay afloat is a risky idea, but it is also the only option left. Although Horowitz succeeds in staving off bankruptcy with the IPO, he will face the same crisis again at multiple, later points.

The tone of the text might be said to be instructional, if not procedural, before anything else. Horowitz’s premiere task is to impart knowledge gained from his own experience to his readers. With that said, Horowitz consistently imbues the text with both sarcastic humor and access to his own emotional vulnerabilities as he navigates the business side of tech.

Horowitz goes on to point out the vulnerability of his business not only due to market forces and financial downturns but also because of world events. The 9/11 terrorist attacks put LoudCloud’s future earnings at risk. Surviving a world in chaos requires adapting to rapid change at a speed that most people never have to consider. In addition, adaptability demands a ruthless nonattachment to previous methods and products. LoudCloud is sold, and the company reinvents itself as Opsware, which specializes in software rather than cloud web hosting. These quick pivots typify the ruthless pace of the tech industry and show its newness in regard to philosophies for success. In the past, it was far less common for companies to change both their name and what they sold; in the tech industry, doing so can be the best way to survive.

The chaos that has plagued the tech industry persists through the early years of the 21st century, and Horowitz recounts yet another crisis. Because so much of his business experience takes place during the most volatile years of technological innovation, it is understandable that he would view himself as being in conflict: “This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility” (32). The book’s first segment ends on a high note, however, with the sale of Opsware and Horowitz’s transition into the role of venture capitalist. The remainder of The Hard Thing About Hard Things devotes itself to the lessons learned by Horowitz while navigating the world’s first tech boom.