The hard thing about hard things: building a business when there are no easy answers

1. From Communist to venture capitalist

2. "I will survive"

3. This time with feeling

4. When things fall apart : The struggle ; CEOs should tell it like it is ; The right way to lay people off ; Preparing to fire an executive ; Demoting a loyal friend ; Lies that losers tell ; Lead bullets ; Nobody cares

5. Take care of the people, the products, and the profits

in that order : A good place to work ; Why startups should train their people ; Is it okay to hire people from your friend's company? ; Why it's hard to bring big company execs into little companies ; Hiring executives: if you've never done the job, how do you hire somebody good? ; When employees misinterpret managers ; Management debt ; Management quality assurance

6. Concerning the going concern : How to minimize politics in your company ; The right kind of ambition ; Titles and promotions ; When smart people are bad employees ; Old people ; One-on-one ; Programming your culture ; Taking the mystery out of scaling a company ; The scale anticipation fallacy

7. How to lead even when you don't know where you are going : The most difficult CEO skill ; The fine line between fear and courage ; Ones and twos ; Follow the leader ; Peacetime CEO/wartime CEO ; Making yourself a CEO ; How to evaluate CEOs

8. First rule of entrepreneurship: there are no rules : Solving the accountability vs. creativity paradox ; The freaky Friday management technique ; Staying great ; Should you sell your company?

9. The end of the beginning

Appendix: Questions for head of Enterprise sales force.