If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network. - Reid Hoffman

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, “People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done.

The purpose of hiring a management team is to solve the organization’s problems in a more scalable way. The CEO should be the hub, and the executive team the spokes that connect the CEO to the frontline managers and employees operating where the rubber hits the road.

Even if the money doesn’t prove to be necessary, a major financing round can also have positive signaling effects — it helps convince the rest of the world that your company is likely to emerge as the market leader, and can discourage investors from backing additional competitors