“When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.”

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

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn’t match… them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That’s the #1 reason this fails. And that’s generally a good place to start.

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really really really large and complex set of skills.

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.

Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.

It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

You know, there’s such a very thin dividing line between inspiration and obsession that sometimes it’s very hard to decide which side we’re really on.

Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health and is as friendly to the mind as to the body.

No man or woman is uniformly successful… we must all expect a rather high percentage of failure in the things we attempt.

Not fulfilling your dreams will be a loss to the world, because the world needs everyone’s gift – yours and mine.

If I were doing five cop shows, I’d probably start struggling to find an identity for each one and struggling to find inspirations.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities – especially visually – with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it.

If I waited for inspiration every time I sat down to write a song I probably would be a plumber today.