Everyone, you know, during crises times, is much more focused on, okay, how do we get the boat completely seaworthy, sailing along well, and everything going well? And so as long as you're communicating how the general strategy of the company and how the work they can do to add to that and to make that more successful and the thing that they can contribute to that, that is generally very motivating for employees in crisis times.

During normal times or boom times, there are some parts of the business that are going to so well, that that can cover for weakness and other parts of the business. What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.

If you have to conduct layoffs, which is always a regrettable thing, there's kind of three things that are very important. One is to communicate well with your employees in order to help them understand why it is you're doing, and how. Second is to make sure that the employees who are part of the go forward, understand kind of what happened and are not like the ground doesn't keep moving. It's like, okay, we did that, we're moving forward, here we go. And then for the employees that you unfortunately have to let go, try to provide as much support for them as possible.

I wish to be focused on kind of the business stuff I'm doing, how do I contribute to our economic progress, how do I help create a future for American industry, American middle class, these kind of things. Those things actually really matter to me.

Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.

What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task... Usually it's best to have two or three people on a team rather than a solo founder.