one of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality … - Ben Horowitz

a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.

how Loudcloud was born. Interestingly, the most lasting remnant of Loudcloud is the name itself, as the word cloud hadn’t been previously used to describe a computing platform. We incorporated the company and set out to raise money. It was 1999.

In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?