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

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

On my grandfather’s tombstone, you will find his favorite Marx quote: “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

We figured there must be a good explanation for this, but struggled to find one. Finally, Marc discovered that the original venture capital firms in the late 1940s and early ’50s were modeled after the original investment banks such as J.P. Morgan and Rothschild. Those banks also did not do PR for a very specific reason: The banks funded wars—and s

we decided to build the following networks: Large companies Every new company needs to either sell something to or partner with a larger company. Executives If you succeed, at some point you need to hire executives. Engineers In the technology business, you can never know enough great engineers. Press and analysts We have a saying around the firm:

So, the judgment that you have to make is (a) is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and (b) are we going to be number one? If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling. If the answers to both are yes, then selling would mean selling yourself and your employ

ON EXPECTATIONS AND LOYALTY If you have a great and loyal executive, how do you communicate all this? How do you tell her that despite the massive effort and great job she is doing today, you might fire her next year if she doesn’t keep up with the changes in the business? When I used to review executives, I would tell them, “You are doing a great

While executives don’t age nearly as fast as athletes do, companies, markets, and technologies change a thousand times faster than the game of football. As a result, the executive who is spectacular in this year’s hundred-person startup may be washed-up in next year’s version when the company employs four hundred people and has $100 million in reve

Through the course of the movie, by being inside each other’s bodies, both characters develop an understanding of the challenges that the other faces. As a result, the two become great friends when they switch back. After watching both the original and the remake, I knew that I had found the answer: I would employ a Freaky Friday management techniq

Feedback is not one-size-fits-all. Everybody is different. Some employees are extremely sensitive to feedback while others have particularly thick skin and often thick skulls. Stylistically, your tone should match the employee’s personality, not your mood.