People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the a… - Ben Horowitz

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.

Let’s look at the case of Opsware. Why did I sell Opsware? Another good question is why didn’t I sell Opsware until I did? At Opsware, we started in the server automation market. When we received our first inquiries and offers for the server automation company, we had fewer than fifty customers. I believed that there were at least ten thousand target customers and that we had a decent shot at being number one. In addition, although I knew the market would be redefined, I thought that we could expand to networks and storage (data center automation) faster than the competition and win that market as well. Therefore, assuming 30 percent market share, somebody would have had to pay sixty times what we were worth in forward credit to buy out our potential. You won’t be surprised to find that nobody was willing to pay that. Once we grew to several hundred customers and expanded into data center automation, we were still number one and were more valuable stand-alone than any of the prior acquisition offers. At that point both Opsware and our main competitor, BladeLogic, had developed into full-fledged companies (worldwide sales forces, built-out professional services, etc.). This was significant, because it meant that a large company could buy one of us and potentially execute successfully (big enterprise companies can’t generally succeed with small acquisitions, because too much of the important intellectual property is the sales methodology, and big companies can’t build that).