Leadership is hard to train on.

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

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.

Don't punk out and don't quit.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.

If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.

You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.