courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the… - Ben Horowitz

At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.

As already noted, courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right.

What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?” The thinking this question leads to can be extremely dangerous.

I let Marc open the conversation, because despite consistently being the smartest person in the room and possibly the world, Marc is so humble that he never believes that other people think he is smart, which makes him sensitive to being ignored.

we studied the venture capital industry and we came across a potential problem with our approach. Historically, all the returns in venture capital had been concentrated in a tiny number of firms and consistently by a small number of the same firms. Of the more than eight hundred venture capital firms of the day, only about six had delivered great returns for their investors. As we dug deeper, we uncovered an excellent reason for this: The best entrepreneurs will only work with the best venture capital firms.