How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really really really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.

It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress of the moment.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. 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.