The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Part #1

Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Instructive tales from a tech survivor: A Silicon Valley entrepreneur tells what he learned the hard way.

Credit to Author

“Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes… They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.”

Loudcloud, Opsware and “the Struggle”

Every start-up encounters the Struggle. Your product turns out to have costly flaws. Your cash runs low, and your venture capitalist tells you fund-raising seems unlikely. A loyal customer leaves you. A valuable employee walks away.

There’s no way around the Struggle and no formula for fixing your problems. Your company might not make it. Entrepreneurs who make it share one characteristic: They don’t quit.

Netscape veterans Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen founded Loudcloud, a cloud services provider, in 1999 and soon hit a rocky road. Seven months after they launched Loudcloud — its name marked the first time “cloud” had been used popularly to describe a computing…