At a macro level, a company will be most successful if the senior managers optimize for the company’s success (think of this as a global optimization… - Ben Horowitz

Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite mixture of intelligence, logic, and courage.

What do you do when you have two outstanding employees who logically both fit in the same place on the organizational chart? Perhaps you have a world-class architect who is running engineering, but she does not have the experience to scale the organization to the next level. You also have an outstanding operational person who is not great technically. You want to keep both in the company, but you only have one position. So you get the bright idea to put “two in the box” and take on a little management debt. The short-term benefits are clear: you keep both employees, you don’t have to develop either because they will theoretically help each other develop, and you instantly close the skill set gap. Unfortunately, you will pay for those benefits with interest and at a very high rate.