“Your employees know each other better than they know you.”

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’

The person they’re working with, is going to be the person they’ll know more. So if that person leaves, they’re going to go – well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives.

If you take care of your workers they’ll take care of your business.

If you look for the best in your employees, they’ll flourish. If you criticize or look for the worst, they’ll shrivel up. We all need lots of watering.

A leader should be a visionary and have more foresight than an employee.

The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Always let your employees come to work with a smile.

A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product.

The customer is number one, the employee is number two and the shareholder is number three. If the customer is happy, the business is happy, and the shareholders are happy.