Scott Weiss

Your happiness is at the intersection of your passions and learning from great people.

Nothing helps make a leader more approachable than admitting your struggles, screw-ups and behind-the-scenes thinking on hard calls. If the leader makes this a priority, the whole company will be more open and methodical learning from failure.

Working at a big company sucks - avoid it. Smaller companies are 10 times better for learning.

At the core, coaching authenticity is complicated - some might say impossible. Telling someone to be authentic sounds pretty low calorie, especially to a founder plowing through a list of product and operational goals. But it's important.

Whatever vocation you decide on, track down the best people in the world at doing it and surround yourself with them.

Feedback for leaders is often nuanced and difficult to deliver. That said, hearing you are passive-aggressive from 10 different people described 10 different ways becomes hard to ignore.

As a decision maker, you rely on information being passed to you by the people who report to you. As the CEO, however, you cannot rely solely on this information. You also need to 'dip' down into your organization and learn directly from employees at all levels and virtually all skill sets.

I wouldn't suggest that being resourceful has anything to do with doing something illegal or unethical, but I've definitely noticed a pattern of being 'creative.'

I don't like sweating the details, and I'm pretty disorganized. To be a better leader, I need to stay on top of these shortcomings, and being reminded really helps.

It's important for a leader to hear about his blind spots on a regular basis so working on them is periodically top of mind.

The best board members aren't elected by default. CEOs that set themselves up with their choice of board member - which means getting more than one term sheet and doing extensive reference checking - are better off.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we talk about the notion of being 'too hungry to eat.' That's to say, we often see startups that are so entrenched in the product that the founders forget they need muscle to grow.