Ben Horowitz - raising capital? You only need one believer

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz on the difficult task of raising money in a down market, and the value of persistence:

Once you begin your process, keep in mind that you are looking for a market of one. You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one. If 20 investors tell you “no”, that does not mean that there is no market for your deal. You just need one to say yes and she will erase all 20 no’s.

A CEO learns from other CEO's mistakes

A very Mistake-Banky snippet of the outstanding "CEO psychology" post from Venture Capitalist and one-time CEO Ben Horowitz:

Although it’s nearly impossible to get high quality advice on the tough decisions that you make, it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been through similarly challenging decisions. My friend Bill Campbell was a huge help to me as CEO, but interestingly it wasn’t his great success running Intuit that I found most useful; it was his disastrous experience running Go. Through that experience and his most traumatic days at Intuit (like laying off 1/3 of the company), Bill learned a tremendous amount about how to think about excruciatingly difficult decisions from a psychological perspective.