Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.

If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.

John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

I try to help people with management stuff a lot.

Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better board' can be helpful.

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.

The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.

Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.

You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.

You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.