Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it. Nobody w… - Ben Horowitz

No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong — when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill

Let’s look at the case of Opsware. Why did I sell Opsware? Another good question is why didn’t I sell Opsware until I did? At Opsware, we started in the server automation market. When we received our first inquiries and offers for the server automation company, we had fewer than fifty customers. I believed that there were at least ten thousand target customers and that we had a decent shot at being number one. In addition, although I knew the market would be redefined, I thought that we could expand to networks and storage (data center automation) faster than the competition and win that market as well. Therefore, assuming 30 percent market share, somebody would have had to pay sixty times what we were worth in forward credit to buy out our potential. You won’t be surprised to find that nobody was willing to pay that. Once we grew to several hundred customers and expanded into data center automation, we were still number one and were more valuable stand-alone than any of the prior acquisition offers. At that point both Opsware and our main competitor, BladeLogic, had developed into full-fledged companies (worldwide sales forces, built-out professional services, etc.). This was significant, because it meant that a large company could buy one of us and potentially execute successfully (big enterprise companies can’t generally succeed with small acquisitions, because too much of the important intellectual property is the sales methodology, and big companies can’t build that).

refrain from throwing the executive under the bus.