When you first sit down to write songs, you have to be selfish.

You have to write songs for yourself and not worry about what other people are going to say or think about it. But ultimately it does go out to a lot of people and it will make its way into their lives, and that's really special.

I get really angsty if I've got songs building up and I haven't gotten them recorded.

The music you play, it's never intended for other people, so it's quite amazing dealing with stuff now, because obviously any tracks I write, a lot of folks are going to hear. It definitely plays on my mind quite a lot.

I meet a lot of people who are awkward around me now. I was always embarrassed about that; the more attention I got, the less I wanted it and the more it would manifest in a physical way and I would be hunched over about it. I'm just starting to realise now that it's not my problem, it's somebody else's problem.

It's nice to be the centre of attention among many women.

I find it funny how at British festivals there are such inflated egos. It's rare that I even talk to anyone at a lot of them.

I just write about myself all the time, which is a funny one, because I don't really like sharing much stuff with other people, apart from music.

I live inside my own brain, most of the time. So where I am physically doesn't really bother me - if the physical place sparks something in my imagination, then it's a good place.

I guess I'm the sort who, if I find something comfortable, tends to push against it.

It's the bane of my life and my existence, people telling me to be a little more succinct with what I write.

I'm terrified of routine.

I listen to other people's stuff and, more and more, you realise how much is layered and how many different guitar parts there are.

When you're playing guitar, it's the tiny little nuances that make the difference. For me, obviously, tunings is a huge one.

You realise that people do things differently to each other and, more and more, I realise that there's no right or wrong. You can be a pop star and singing cabaret, and the entertainment of it is your flamboyance, it is your attitude.

I don't know if I'm particularly shy.

I think as soon as you start believing you're doing something superior to other people, then you start losing the plot.

We'd get residencies in the local pubs. It was just an excuse to have a free tab at the bar, and then at some point people started chucking me a few quid for it. There was no game plan to any of it.

For me, recording was a lot about honing my guitar skills and honing my singing.

With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.

When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.

Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.

As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.

I'm a huge believer in clarity.

If I have one skill as a manager, I can make things extremely clear.

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don't have investments in.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.

I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.

You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.