Results against objectives Once you’ve set a high standard, it will be straightforward to measure your executive against that standard. - Ben Horowitz

During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.” We eventually found investors for a series C round (meaning our third round of funding) at an amazing $700 million pre-money valuation and raised $120 million.

Specifically, each of our three deals contained something that had come to be known in the industry as the “CA clause” in honor of the infamous software company Computer Associates, or CA for short. The CA clause had come about as a result of some of CA’s business practices. Apparently CA had tricked their customers by selling them maintenance contracts that gave them rights to free upgrades forever for products named “X.” CA would then change the name of product “X” to product “Y” and charge their customers for an upgrade the customers thought they were entitled to for free. It was very clever, and totally dirty.

Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, you may also get knocked cold. Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion.