What matters most is their passion -- their focus on serving a large, unmet market need with an outstanding team and disruptive innovation. Their commitment to technical excellence, and obsessing on customers (not competition). Their pursuit of reasonable financings, but unreasonable, audacious goals. Their sense of urgency. Their ambition, vision, confidence and humility in putting their team first. They must be missionaries, not mercenaries.

43 years ago, Andy Grove shared the single most important lesson of my career with me. He said, “John, it almost doesn’t matter what you know…it’s execution that matters most.” Andy invented a powerful system to drive execution called Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs.