Accounting is the bastardization of economics. It can be puzzling to see early stage ventures focusing on P&L profitability, as that mentality can choke off growth in a hurry. You should not care much about profits early on. Instead, you care about maximizing growth while maintaining sufficient cash balances to sustain it.

After suffering through a few instances of this mismatch at Data Domain, we adjusted our search algorithm and began looking for candidates who did not have the resume yet but did have the potential and desire for a career break to get to the next level. We called them "athletes": candidates with the right aptitude and behavior profile but without

So, creative destruction is an axiom of business: you are not going to grow much without exacting a proportional decrease in business somewhere else. You better know whose livelihood you're going to mess with.

Early on, when employee candidates asked us what our culture was like, we invariably said "blue collar." Not a lot of flash—if it doesn't directly aid our cause, we don't spend money on it. Extravagance was frowned upon, and becoming self-congratulatory was avoided; these things weaken the focus and muscle of the company. Setting the tone comes

Like art being 99% perspiration (versus inspiration), business is 99% execution (versus strategy). A company can go a long way with an average strategy and superior execution, but they will not go far without great execution, no matter how brilliant the strategy.

He had this style about him leaving no doubt that while he would share his point of view, he was not making recommendations or prescriptions: you, the CEO, were the judge. It actually made it easier to seek him out, as he didn't demand you follow his point of view. He impressed on me that the role of the board was to hire and fire the CEO, and that

I found this advice priceless. You might as well spend all your time on winning—nothing else matters. Of course, a good board wants you to do exactly that. It obviously doesn't mean you should blindly bat away all opinions coming at you, but just try them on for size and merit, and go from there. Keeping good council is strength; caving in on

In hindsight, it helped explain how some of our breakthroughs came about: they ended up betting on Moore's law, the microprocessor subsystem, and avoiding the entrenched bottlenecks in the storage subsystem

They don't "work for you"—we all work for the company. As a manager, you are there to help them succeed.