When people in my company would complain about one thing or another being broken, such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all… - Ben Horowitz

It taught me that being scared didn’t mean I was gutless. What I did mattered and would determine whether I would be a hero or a coward.

In the long term, however, Netscape inflicted irreparable damage on Microsoft’s stronghold on the computing industry: our work moved developers from Win32 API, Microsoft’s proprietary platform, to the Internet. Someone writing new functionality for computers no longer wrote for Microsoft’s proprietary platform. Instead, they wrote to the Internet and World Wide Web’s standard interfaces. Once Microsoft lost its grip on developers, it became only a matter of time before it lost its monopoly on operating systems. Along the way, Netscape invented many of the foundational technologies of the modern Internet, including JavaScript, SSL, and cookies.

The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.