Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.

We wanted the firm to respect the fact that in the bacon-and-egg breakfast of a startup, we were with the chicken and the entrepreneur was the pig: We were involved, but she was committed. We

In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective, and make a difference for

there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

Want to see a great company story? Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997.

A good product manager is the CEO of the product.

Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

One good test for determining whether to go with outside experience versus internal promotion is to figure out whether you value inside knowledge or outside knowledge more for the position. For example, for engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than