CEOs can't manage from behind the desk—you need to be the first guy or gal over the barricades, gloves off. You need to know from experience what it's like getting your nose bloodied; otherwise, your troops can't relate to you and you can't relate to them.

Our drive for a set of values in the organization came about gradually, as more people came into the company. We started writing them down and describing them: Respect Excellence Customer Integrity Performance Execution The first letter of each of the six values spells the word R-E-C-I-P-E.

Speed is the essence of a startup: we have to be able to take mistakes in stride, and self-correct in the normal course of business.

Also, with this source document, in-person discussions quickly accelerate past the basics and become more pointed, resulting in more productive exchanges.

I have seen startups managing for profitability prematurely—a huge mistake. They simply do not appreciate the dynamics of an early stage, high growth operation versus a large, steady-state company. Big company thinking: check it at the door.

Startup CEOs are more like plow horses than racehorses. A racehorse gets pampered all week, to be taken out of the barn for a few minutes to race on Saturday afternoon; startup CEOs live 12+ hours a day behind the plow. It doesn't feel so glamorous when you get home at 11 at night and you need to get up at 5 am to catch a flight out of town.

Somebody once asked me how he or she would know whether they were a driver, and I answered, "you better find out before we do." In other words, be more demanding of yourself. Are you increasing the company's speed or not?

The famed Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter is usually associated with this term, but the basic idea goes back all the way to the works of Karl Marx. The notion (which has experienced a recent resurgence via Clayton Christensen's writings on disruptive innovation) is that in order to create something, you have to destroy something else in the

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