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Friends come and go; enemies accumulate. At Sequoia, we meet with thousands of companies every year, and only partner with 15-20. That’s thousands of interactions where we run the risk of making a negative impression. Regardless of whether we end up partnering with them, we always want founders to know we respect them and their ideas. I’m mindful of how I treat people and I think about the long-term consequences of my interactions. The people we meet with will tell others about their experience, good or bad.

A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees. You probably shouldn't even start a company to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two sentences.

Notifications in the least places: I’m trying to have my notifications in as few places as possible. I have selected my email inbox and Slack and I don’t check notifications anywhere else.

And I said, you know, Derek, when you meet a rookie for the first time in spring training, can you tell whether they're going to be an all star? He said absolutely every single time. And, I hesitated for a second and I did something I usually don't do, which is I asked a question I don't know the answer to, and I said, how? And he shocked me because I assumed he would talk about, like, someone swing, their technique, blah, blah, blah, something. He's like, nope, just their confidence. And then it was fascinating because as soon as you said that, it made so much sense and I re-derived it, it's like, well, why do you have confidence? Well, your technique and your swing may be actually pretty damn good. Like you actually know when you're batting, you're actually pretty damn good at what you do. But then also there's a lot of mental toughness, resilience is all more critical to success at a high level in most fields than just the technique. And so he combined the two and one really pithy answer.

there are 2 kinds of engineers - the kind that thinks about their job as solving a series of brain teasers - the kind that thinks about their job as building things big co folks skew towards the former because everything has already been built startup people skew to the latter

You should write unreasonably short job descriptions and know exactly what you're looking for, and make it easy to assess someone's performance on one metric first.

During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost.

Kill your darlings. Delete beautiful ideas and phrases if they don’t help the customer solve their problem.

Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavours. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-belief.

[How to maintain effectiveness in meetings?] The supervisor should keep things on track, with the subordinates bearing the brunt of working the issues.