by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz shares hard-won lessons from running a startup through near-death crises. There is no formula, leadership means making impossible decisions when there are no good options.
In this collection, The Hard Thing About Hard Things references 3 other books and is cited by 6 other books.
It draws on High Output Management, The Innovator's Dilemma and Good to Great.
It’s picked up by Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It and The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future and 3 others.
Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is widely respected as the most honest account of what running a startup actually feels like when things go wrong. Scott Kupor, Horowitz's co-founder at a16z, designed Secrets of Sand Hill Road as an explicit companion read, and Sebastian Mallaby draws on it extensively for the a16z chapters of The Power Law. Eric Schmidt's Trillion Dollar Coach cross-references it on CEO coaching, since Bill Campbell coached Horowitz himself.
Rand Fishkin engages with it directly in Lost and Founder, while arguing that Horowitz's playbook assumes a level of capital and talent most founders simply do not have. Readers value its raw, no-platitudes approach to layoffs, demotions, and near-death company moments, finding it a corrective to the optimism bias of most business books. The main criticism is that its lessons are drawn from a rarefied world of well-funded Silicon Valley companies and may not translate to smaller-scale entrepreneurship.
The books Horowitz references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Horowitz references Grove as a mentor.
Horowitz discusses Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.
Horowitz references Collins while distinguishing peacetime vs wartime leadership.
The exact passages where other authors bring up “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and what they take from it.
Points founders to Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things for the operating-CEO perspective on living with the governance structures that Venture Deals teaches you to negotiate
Cited in
Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalistby Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Cross-references Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things on founder CEO decisions, since Horowitz is Kupor's co-founder at a16z and the two books are explicitly designed as companion reads
Draws on Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things for the a16z chapters, using Horowitz's account of his operator-to-VC transition to explain the firm's hands-on investing thesis
Engages Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things as the closest analog for Moz's crisis narrative, while arguing Horowitz's playbook assumes a level of capital and talent most founders don't have
Cross-references Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things on CEO coaching and tough people calls, since Campbell coached Horowitz and many a16z-backed founders
Cited in
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbellby Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
Both McCord and Horowitz address the brutally hard decisions of letting people go; McCord's approach to honest performance conversations complements Horowitz's hard thing about hard things
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
This book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
Hover a node to highlight its connections. Click to open the book page. Node size reflects total citation links.
