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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Ben Horowitz provides his first-hand experience of building startups in this book;
Being emotionally prepared is a must to build a company;
Learning by doing is the best experience.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

It's never too late to read and reread this book if you want to build a company.

✍️ Top Quotes From the Book

Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
It’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
Once you decide that you will have to lay people off, the time elapsed between making that decision and executing that decision should be as short as possible.
“Ben, you cannot let him keep his job, but you absolutely can let him keep his respect.”
The Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.
The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.
Hiring senior people into a startup is kind of like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs. If all goes well, you will achieve incredible new heights. If all goes wrong, you will start degenerating from the inside out.
The most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.
By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology.