A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. - Ben Horowitz

We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense).

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

If we lost a big prospect, the whole organization needed to understand why, so that we could together fix the things that were broken in our products, marketing, and sales process.