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…
More »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 for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business.
Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. I’ve been watching the coverage from the sidelines up to this point, but felt increasingly compelled to join the conversation and share my point of view. So here goes.
More »A few months ago, Aneel Bhusri offered to introduce me to one his favorite entrepreneurs. Since Aneel is, for my money, the best enterprise venture capitalist in the world, I immediately agreed and Aneel did not disappoint. He introduced me to Christian Gheorghe, founder of TIAN Software, a predictive analytics company acquired by OutlookSoft, where, as Chief Technology Officer, he introduced important and innovative Enterprise Performance Management applications into the market. OutlookSoft was eventually acquired by
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