The key to high-quality communication is trust, and its hard to trust somebody that you dont know.

The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

Leadership is hard to train on.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

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

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 pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.