Ben Horowitz on how to deal with “The Struggle”

November 04, 2024

Ben is asked about his famous blog post “The Struggle” and how to deal with it.

He recalls Business Week writing a cover story about his company Loudcloud titled “The IPO from Hell.” The Red Herring wrote an article speculating that Ben was taking the company’s cash and setting it on fire in his parking lot.

“These things hurt my feelings… But most of the stress doesn’t come so much from what people in the press and people on Twitter think. It’s more how people in the company start to feel about it. You’ve brought all these people in. They believed in you. Things aren’t going as sold. And you feel that, and it’s going badly. And then it’s amplified if they read that you suck in the press, as they did about me many times.”

He continues:

“I didn’t care that they said I was an idiot. What bothered me was people who work for me would go home and their spouse would go, ‘You know your CEO is an idiot? I just read it here in Business Week.’”

As an entrepreneur, Ben had never really found a great outlet for this. He vented to his friend Bill Campbell who had similar experiences running a company called Go. But that didn’t help that much:

“We’d talk about it and he would understand, but it didn’t help that much. It’s still a struggle. It’s still difficult. You just have to focus your mind on what you can do… You can’t focus on what’s going wrong and what that might imply.”

He recalls an idea from Peter Thiel’s class on startups:

“He says there are people who believe in statistics — they believe there are probabilities, that things happen, and all you can do is run a process and it is what it is… And then there are people who believe in calculus, and they believe there’s a right answer. If you’re a startup CEO, you have to believe in calculus. You have to believe you can find the answer and that’s all you can focus on… And trust me, there’s always an answer.”

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