Innovative cultures transparently document spending, admit mistakes, and ask how they can do better.
The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.
One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent.
A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.
In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.
Those who ultimately shake up an industry are often outsiders who don't know any better.
A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.
I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.
Great leaders inspire incredible loyalty in their followers and subordinates.
A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.
Creating a billion-dollar company is hard, but being a truly great leader is even harder.
One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others.
Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it's our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.
Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.
Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.
What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I'd say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what's more important is to get real experience at a great startup.
There's no substitute for experiencing ups and downs - seeing how it's okay that things are overwhelming or broken sometimes and how companies recover from mistakes.
Marketing is your battle plan for the sales team - it's about defining the landscape. Marketing is doing cohort analysis and understanding exactly what possible customers are out there. It's understanding not only which customers will respond to what messages, but also how customers will become clients if you include certain product features.
