Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
Visit Site »Every good technology company needs great people. The best companies invest time, money, and sweat equity into becoming world-class recruiting machines. But how far should you take your quest to build the world’s greatest team? Is it fair game to hire employees from your friend’s company? Will you still be friends? First, what do I…
One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand-alone involves a huge number of factors, most of which are speculative or unknown. And if you are…
In hi-tech, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.…
In Jim Collins’ best selling management book Good to Great, he demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. As I discussed in Why We Prefer Founding CEOs, knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, et al tend…
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume” enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter. But…
The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. In fact, often you will have to hire and manage…
Disclaimer: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard…
Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several…
In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Surprisingly to me, I received a large number of responses from readers questioning whether or not this was good advice.…
In all my years in business, I have yet to hear someone say: “I love corporate politics.” On the other hand, I meet plenty of people who complain bitterly about corporate politics—sometimes even in the companies they run. So, if nobody…
If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today’s Google employs 20,000 people and today’s Facebook employs over 1,500 people. …
Recently, I was reminded of one of the more annoying things that happens to the CEO when things go horribly wrong in your business. After a terrible event such as a lay off or a whiffed quarter or getting stomped by the competition in a critical deal, you run the scenarios of doom…
My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. As a young CEO, I felt the pressure—the pressure of employees depending on me, the pressure of not really knowing what I was doing, the pressure of being responsible…
Often when super successful entrepreneurs found their second company, they suffer from a dangerous condition. In fact, the more successful the original startup, the more likely it is that the entrepreneur develops an acute case of Second Startup Syndrome.…