Boom and bust cycles are very difficult for businesses because you're hiring a bunch because you're planning for the future. And if the future is going to be very big, you need to hire people, or suddenly you go to boom to bust, then all of a sudden, you're kind of battening down the hatches and trying to sail, you know, through the storm, it's a different thing. So part of it is making good decisions about, well, how long is a boom cycle going to be, you know, don't plan on it going forever.

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.

When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.

The underpinnings of the alliance: the company helps the employee transform his career; the employee helps the company transform.

Part of the reason we like democracy is it's the portfolio of decades, which is to say you don't also get the disastrous dictator who completely destroys a society, engages you in wars and so forth.

Make sure a certain percentage of the people that you're hiring are generalists so that you can be, kind of reconfigured in the workforce pretty easily.

We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning