I never built that contingency plan. Through the seemingly impossible Loudcloud series C and IPO processes, I learned one important lesson: Startup C… - Ben Horowitz

It’s good to anticipate growth, but it’s bad to overanticipate growth.

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company — literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.

A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.