Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time ... He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

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.