A company is a team effort and, no matter how high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work in a manner in whic… - Ben Horowitz

You hired for the generic position. There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. That position is not the same as the same position at Microsoft or Facebook. Don’t look for the candidate out of central casting. This is not a movie.

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

You hired for scale too soon. The most consistently wrong advice that venture capitalists and executive recruiters give CEOs is to hire someone “bigger” than required. “Think about the next three to five years and how you will be a large company” is how the bad advice usually sounds.