The first set of questions to ask yourself when you're doing cost cutting is relatively straightforward, which is, you know, can you use the necessity of cost cutting as an opportunity to do pruning or trimming for projects that aren't being as successful? But, you know, frequently those are the easy ones. I mean, there's always some kind of social costs internal to the company, but that's the easy way of looking at the future.

Success...is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.

People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. That is how LinkedIn operates.

One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I'm looking for is both flexibility & persistence.

Now, in economic crises times, the kind of things you're looking at is it's generally harder to get capital, revenue growth may be more, revenue lines may be unstable or growth may be less easy to predict that you're going to get to. And so what you do is you take a certain conservative approach of when, as all entrepreneurs should do, you plan for both good luck and bad luck, you put extra time on, "Okay, if I have bad luck, what do I do about that?"

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.

Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.