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Borland was tanking. I’d survived three rounds of layoffs primarily because my project was still generating quite a bit of revenue, but every meeting I attended everyone kept using the word .

Somewhere in your third year of being a manager, the management pixies will appear in your office in a puff of sweet-smelling black smoke. There will be three of them, and one will be carrying a gorgeous black top hat.

Max was a mess. We were on our third mojito at the Basin in Saratoga when it just came pouring out of him. The last 72 hours involved this:

Lunch at Don Giovanni’s with Phillip. He’s amped. We haven’t even seen our waiter and he’s already cleared the table and is scribbling furiously on the white paper tablecloth.

In 2006,I gave a presentation at South by Southwest. My pitch was this: in creating a startup, you’re going to be faced with a thousand seemingly inconsequential decisions. Tucked among those thousands of decisions are five decisions that actually matter. These decisions will change the face of your company. What I didn’t say was that I believe it’s next to impossible to figure out which decisions matter and which ones do not.

The nerd frenzy around the original was significant and led by the promise of lifelike computer animation. This was a win-win for engineers. Not only do we tap into our preadolescent dinosaur love, but we also get to watch the first movie where dinosaurs actually show up, and, by the way, using . OK, so I was at Borland at the time, and we wrote programming languages and applications in the early ’90s, but .

Each organization in a company has their Favorite Application. It’s not truly their favorite application; it’s just the application they must use in their particular capacity in the organization. Stand up right now and walk into an unfamiliar part of your building and stalk your coworkers. If someone stops and asks you what you’re doing, tell them. “Rands sent me,” and vigorously nod your head. That always works.

At a startup, there are two organizational inflection points that drastically change communication within the organization. The first occurs around 50 or so people. This is the moment when, if you’re an early employee, you see someone in the hallway that you don’t recognize.

Buried. Back at the startup, we were shifting gears. After six months of talking about shipping a product, we needed to ship a product, and nothing gets everyone’s attention like a deadline. The good news was that QA had been doing its job, and there was a pile of work in our bug database. The bad news was that no one had looked at the database in months.

The terrifying reality regarding your résumé is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you’ve got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less.