When I work with entrepreneurs today, this is the main thing that I try to convey. Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the key… - Ben Horowitz

Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not in there, they do not exist.

I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. By running sales, I understood very clearly the strengths we needed. I made a careful list and set out to find the sales executives with the right skills and talents for Opsware.

Now that we’d improved our competitive position, we went on the offensive. In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?

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.