Review by New York Times Review
This how-to management book is a lively, candid account of the lessons Horowitz learned in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the co-founder and chief executive of a cloud services company that thrived, then faltered, then shifted strategies and thrived again before Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2007 for $1.6 billion. Horowitz (who went on to start one of Silicon Valley's most successful venture capital firms with the Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen) is writing mainly for tech entrepreneurs. His loose but engaging thesis is that building a viable business is just plain hard - enthralling, inspiring and satisfying, sure, but also really difficult. Aspiring leaders, he suggests with pluck and humor, should get used to it, get over it and get on with it. Among Horowitz's useful if well-worn lessons - for instance, that good training matters - two larger insights stand out. The first is that businesses should take care of their employees first, then their products, and only then their profits. The logic is simple: If you devote real time, energy and money to developing the right people for your enterprise, then treat them responsibly and respectfully, they're more likely to create great products that will deliver robust profits. In an era of downsizing, cost-cutting and stagnant wages, Horowitz's argument and examples are apt and thought-provoking. The second insight is that individual leaders have to actively manage their own psychological well-being. Horowitz writes openly about the loneliness, self-reproach, sleepless nights and cold sweats of trying to create and oversee a business. Entrepreneurs, chief executives and other leaders will identify with his experience and blunt advice: "Ideally," he says, "the C.E.O. will be urgent yet not insane." These chapters are the strongest in the book, and one wishes Horowitz had devoted more space and attention to these and other internal challenges of leading a business. NANCY KOEHN is a historian at Harvard Business School and a frequent commentator on National Public Radio.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 20, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's fairly evident that this is a collection of blogs, loosely strung together, united in their varied perspectives on start-ups, CEO-dom, and business in general. Though Horowitz is a cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and his credentials reside mainly in Silicon Valley, he's imparted some valuable insight on hard lessons learned that apply to any manager, whether in the executive suite or not. As with most experiential books, it is all about him but it's written in such an engaging and universally acceptable manner that no one could object. Leave aside his background, for the moment. Who would realize, for instance, that executives worry about things like initiating layoffs, hiring the right people, training, and minimizing politics, among others? It's a refreshingly honest take, and his colorful (and, yes, profanity-laced) language breaks down any other misperceptions about the role and the person. Plus, his imagination is compelling, such as the comparisons between peacetime and wartime CEOs: Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. After all, the success equation is easy: the hard thing is getting it done.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Horowitz, a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, offers hard-earned business advice and a compendium of the best posts from his popular blog (ben's blog). For the budding tech mogul, this is heady stuff, and politic to heed, as his firm, Andreesen Horowitz, is a nearly $3 billion powerhouse that has invested in winners, including Skype, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and Zynga. But shrewd investing decisions don't make for riveting prose, as Horowitz repeatedly trots out war and military metaphors to describe the struggle to sustain past businesses. Horowitz is far sharper when he's blunt and candid. Admitting that as a CEO he was always scared is far more useful to the aspiring mogul than heading many chapters with hip-hop lyrics describing street corner struggles. Though passages about minimizing office politics and how a startup executive might grow into managing a larger business contain novel insights, most of the useful observations come from citing other titans, including Intel CEO Andy Grove, Intuit head Bill Campbell, and management guru Tony Robbins. This manual reads as a collection of war stories from the 1990s boom-and-bust era blended with platitudes from an older generation of established business leaders. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
