
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
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Narrated by:
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Kevin Kenerly
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By:
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Ben Horowitz
About this listen
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.
While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.
Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.
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Featured Article: The 20 Best Leadership Audiobooks to Inspire You and Your Team
Often what makes leadership so difficult is not the responsibilities or pressure that comes with it, but the soft skills needed to effectively manage people. Unlike many goals, soft skills are difficult to measure, which can make them hard to improve upon. That’s why we brought in the experts. With advice from some of the best in the business to help you inspire your team and improve your workplace, here is our list of the 20 best leadership audiobooks.
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Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque.
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Stopped reading - politics in a non-political book
- By T on 10-17-19
By: Rand Fishkin
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Good to Great
- Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
- By: Jim Collins
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
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Good info, over-the-top narration
- By Anaxamaxan on 08-31-10
By: Jim Collins
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Blitzscaling
- The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
- By: Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, Bill Gates - foreword
- Narrated by: Chris Yeh, Reid Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water.
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not much here.
- By Francis Shanahan on 09-05-19
By: Reid Hoffman, and others
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The Innovator's Dilemma
- When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
- By: Clayton M. Christensen
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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His work is cited by the world's best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic best seller - one of the most influential business books of all time - innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right - yet still lose market leadership. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.
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This book is best read, not heard
- By Andrea Rudert on 09-09-17
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Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition
- How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
- By: W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.
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Profoundly Insightful
- By James on 10-29-20
By: W. Chan Kim, and others
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Your Next Five Moves
- Master the Art of Business Strategy
- By: Patrick Bet-David
- Narrated by: Patrick Bet-David
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From the creator of Valuetainment, the number-one YouTube channel for entrepreneurs, and “one of the most exciting thinkers” (Ray Dalio, author of Principles) in business today, comes a practical and effective guide for thinking more clearly and achieving your most audacious professional goals.
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Mediocre; few actionable take-aways.
- By Michael on 10-31-20
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Principles
- Life and Work
- By: Ray Dalio
- Narrated by: Ray Dalio, Jeremy Bobb
- Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past 40 years to create unique results in both life and business - and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
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Idea-meritocracy/Principles Reference
- By P Eberle on 06-30-18
By: Ray Dalio
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Unleash the Inner CEO
- Make distributed leadership a reality
- By: Jeremy Blain
- Narrated by: Matt Reeves, Stephanie Racine
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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We have been talking about ‘leadership at all levels’ for over a century – let’s make it a reality for today’s world. This completely updated second edition of the award-winning The Inner CEO provides the tried and tested blueprint to make distributed leadership a reality and tap into the potential of the many.
By: Jeremy Blain
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Build
- An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
- By: Tony Fadell
- Narrated by: Tony Fadell, Roger Wayne
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.
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Best guide for start up founders, ever!!!
- By Curly Beard on 05-28-22
By: Tony Fadell
What listeners say about The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Highly rated for:
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- Scott Wozniak
- 03-03-15
Strong, insightful, and a bit vulgar
Ben Horowitz has been there and done that--that being starting a tech firm and leading it through chaos and surprise and heartbreak to success. He isn't sharing leadership theory, he's sharing his life lessons.
As such, he offers specific examples and actual numbers for each of his principles. And his principles are insightful and practical. A few are powerful, like the idea of management debt: you can delay making a hard decision but you incur "debt". The problem didn't go away, you will have to pay it later--with interest. So pay now and reduce the cost. Also, don't hire a stereotypical executive, hire the one that fits the exact situation of your company. For example, there's a big difference between running a large company and building a large company. The first is more about managing lots of pressure--reacting well. The second is about creating growth through aggressive action--without anyone pressuring you to do it.
I give 4 rather than 5 stars to this strong leadership book because of the large amount of foul language. Not only is there a section where he decided as CEO to allow a tech culture norm of expletives (that was strategic at least), but he cusses every couple of pages. I guess he's being authentic but it is distracting.
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22 people found this helpful
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- Jim Baker
- 04-16-18
Best business book to date
This is the best business book I’ve ever read or listened to. I don’t expect that to be the case for everyone, but it’s in line with my style of running a company. If you’re weak it will strengthen you.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ben Martinec
- 10-02-18
Best narration I have heard thus far. Great Read!
Must read/listen if you want to be in business. Gives unique perspective to it all.
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- Howard
- 08-07-18
Great book on Management
This is an awesome book to learn more about management and how to grow a company. Ben Horowitz does a great job telling his story, while interweaving lessons about how to run and grow a company, be a successfully manager, a provide a good basis for how we can improve ourselves. Definitely will be listening to this again for all the great learnings!
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- AmaTom
- 09-02-18
Fantastic!
This is the best and most detailed all around management book I have ever read. Should be required reading for every founder CEO.
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- Jimbob
- 06-02-18
This is a milestone in history of entrepreneurship
This is what everybody has been looking for, honest, unfiltered experienced not wrapped in fancy words and self celebration. Those personal experience shared by Ben Horowitz are worth 1000 times more than this book costs.
The speaker is amazing and the hip hop cuotes make it a entertaining listen.
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- Robert B
- 07-09-17
One word: Real
Anyone interested in becoming a CEO or is a CEO will find this to be an impactful book with real advice. No fluff, just down right lessons from a bunch of smart entrepreneurs. I especially enjoyed the story telling aspects!!
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- briancooper
- 12-26-17
Hard Hitting
Some truly GREAT insights but didn't agree with all of them. Brutally honest account of running a business as an entrepreneur. Parts/Sections of the book did not flow that well. Narrator was ok.
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- fernando
- 02-20-15
Different point of view
Very useful insights about issues no one talks about. A good source of ideas to use at work.
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- Honza
- 11-27-15
Motivating
Sincere reflection of BH's early career and success, frank and eventually motivating for every aspiring entrepreneur.
I just don't why every CXO is called "she" while in the real story they are almost exclusively all men. This is quite disturbing.
Worth reading/listening to anyway.
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