In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. - Ben Horowitz

important execution details required to run a company, such as process design, goal setting, structured accountability, training, and performance management.

Whenever I spoke to other CEOs, they all seemed like they had everything under control. Their businesses were always going “fantastic” and their experience was inevitably “amazing.” I thought that maybe growing up in Berkeley with Communist grandparents might not have been the best background for running a company. But as I watched my peers’ fantastic, amazing businesses go bankrupt and sell for cheap, I realized that I was probably not the only one struggling.

As painful as it might be, I knew that we had to get into the broader market in order to understand it well enough to build the right product. Paradoxically, the only way to do that was to ship and try to sell the wrong product. We would fall on our faces, but we would learn fast and do what was needed to survive.