However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent… - Ben Horowitz

Every CEO likes to say she runs a great company. It’s hard to tell whether the claim is true until the company or the CEO has to do something really difficult.

We would have won, but the other guys gave the deal away.” “The customer selected us technically and thinks we are the better company, but our competitor just gave the product away. We would never sell so cheaply as it would hurt our reputation.” Anybody who has ever run an enterprise sales force has heard this lie before. You go into an account, you fight hard, and you lose. The sales rep, not wanting to shine the light on himself, blames the “used car dealer” rep from the other company. The CEO, not wanting to believe that she’s losing product competitiveness, believes the rep. If you hear this lie, try to validate the claim with the actual customer. I’ll bet you can’t.

I ran through different scenarios in my mind where we might move into the software business and exit the cloud business. In each scenario, step one was separating Opsware from Loudcloud. Opsware had been written to run only in Loudcloud and had many constraints that prevented it from being a product that would work in any environment.