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

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.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.

It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.

Here’s Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can’t even deal with him because he’s always saying something that people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe Kanye said that. I can’t believe he did that.’

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

Saudi Arabia has said that if the US-led coalition against Daesh is prepared to engage in ground operations

I had to fight with myself ’cause he’s so good, yet he’s so popular.

Your twenties are the time to both accept and fight your way into the person you’re destined to become.

When Donald Trump focuses on a fight with the press or investigating leaks but doesn’t seem committed to standing up to what Russia is doing at home and around the world, that is of profound concern.

Russia is a competitor. They’re a strong nation, something we need to recognize, but their economy is just a little bit bigger than Illinois, so they’re not our equal.

Regarding stickyfish teams, I favor the Bigfield Fighting Koobish.

You can always create something that’s different because there’s more than two people in the ring.

I can’t remember any text of mine where I said that one should fight Hitler without violence; I’m not an idiot.