Some people can't learn to play the guitar by reading a book. You have to actually try to manage a bit and you won't do well at first.

The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.

At first when you start a company, everything's gonna feel like a mess and it really should. It should feel like everyday there's a new problem, and what you're doing is fundamentally triaging.

The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.

It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.

It's actually a good thing if you do reference checks on somebody and half the people you call say they are a micromanager and the other half say they actually give me a lot of responsibility. That's a feature not a bug.

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company. One of the ways, the definition of a barrel is, they can take an idea from conception and take it all the way to shipping and bring people with them.