After eight years of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I had learned so many hard lessons that building the team was easy. I understood the importance o… - Ben Horowitz

how Loudcloud was born. Interestingly, the most lasting remnant of Loudcloud is the name itself, as the word cloud hadn’t been previously used to describe a computing platform. We incorporated the company and set out to raise money. It was 1999.

Enforce functional training by withholding new employee requisitions. As Andy Grove writes, there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program for the TBH, “To Be Hired.

Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More important, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that’s compelling enough to make people stay?