Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both. - Ben Horowitz

Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously. They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to one-on-ones. Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee, a customer, a partner, or an investor.

I tried to make myself feel better by asking, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” The answer always came back the same: “We’ll go bankrupt, I’ll lose everybody’s money including my mother’s, I’ll have to lay off all the people who have been working so hard in a very bad economy, all of the customers who trusted me will be screwed, and my reputation will be ruined.” Funny, asking that question never made me feel any better. Then one day I asked myself a different question: “What would I do if we went bankrupt?” The answer that I came up with surprised me: “I’d buy our software, Opsware, which runs in Loudcloud, out of bankruptcy and start a software company.” Opsware was the software that we’d written to automate all the tasks of running the cloud: provisioning servers and networking equipment, deploying applications, recovering the environment in case of disaster, and so forth. Then I asked myself another question: “Is there a way to do that without going bankrupt?

From an evolutionary standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.