Your business is in free fall and the bank has turned off the credit tap. Private investors don’t trust your project, and your trusted adviser tells you it has probably come time to throw in the towel. But you don’t give up, and you keep knocking on every kind of door, looking for that chance to stay afloat.
You are anxiously waiting for a call from a banker who has promised to take a closer look at your project and lend you the money you need to avoid closing the business. Then the phone rings, but when you answer it isn’t the banker. It’s the hospital, calling to tell you that your wife has had an allergic reaction to a medicine and is in a very serious condition, barely able to breathe. At that moment you feel real fear, with the sense that the world is collapsing under your feet.
That is the story of Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and a highly respected businessman in Silicon Valley, who has decided to write an unusual book. While everyone talks to you about the beauty of entrepreneurship, very few devote whole chapters to the tough, enormous difficulties that come with starting and running your own business.
Horowitz says he focused on the problems that leaders and business owners have to face every day in the hard work of running their own business, because business schools don’t cover that part, and neither do the relentlessly positive messages found online these days about how wonderful it is to have your own business and about the figure of the wealthy entrepreneur.
The reality is that for a long time you will be a complete slave to your business, and you will face problems that will keep you awake at night: management, selling, buying, investing, supervision, hiring, and so on.
(Read: 10 wise business lessons from the best executive of the 20th century)
Although he says he wrote the book with a sense of humour, he admits that he speaks very plainly about many subjects nobody ever prepared you for.
His advice and business lessons are based on anecdotes from his own experience and from all he went through before building the successful venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. So what problems could keep a business owner awake at night?
Besides the usual management difficulties, Ben says it is not easy to have to demote or fire a loyal friend.
At first the weight of the business rests on your shoulders, and when you hire your first employees you are not free of difficulties either, so you have to manage your own psychology properly while the whole company is leaning on you. You can’t afford to waver.
Then there is the helplessness of watching the smartest people in your company turn out to be bad employees, as well as not knowing when it is time to keep going or to throw in the towel.
The odds of success are against you: most ideas fall by the wayside. The five-year failure rate for a business is extremely high. That is the path an entrepreneur chooses.
It is often said that not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, although it is also true that many people aren’t cut out for it because they don’t know what they are up against, and that may be why they are not ready to decide whether they could stand that path in pursuit of their goals and a dream life.
Every entrepreneur should know that starting a business is not easy. It is, rather, something very hard, where you will probably find yourself alone. Of course, as with any other goal, we will have to make an effort to earn our reward.
Further reading
- Why failing in business in Spain is anything but romantic
- The secret to getting rich is having a stupid business idea
Featured image: Vice-Presidência da República (VPR), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
