be a part-time job if you just hire the right people and keep it simple. Many people were frustrated by his presence because they thought he was a simpleton. But he found a way to have a very successful presidency by most objective means, whether you agreed with his politics or not, by keeping it simple and hiring great people.

What happened to me, to answer your question, was because of very high energy I kept allowing myself to get dragged down into the details, and then I found myself trying to make decisions below my level of authority in the organization. That screws up everything in a company because, first of all, people don’t feel empowered; second, they don’t feel responsible. They can just stand back and say: “Well, I’ll just wait for the boss to decide,” and then you end up being like the proverbial boy with the finger in the dike. It’s just not the way you run a sizeable organization. So people who’ve been mentored properly understand that they need to find a way to keep at a high level and not allow themselves to be tempted to get drawn down into the details.

I’ll go with that presidential analysis again, you know, Jimmy Carter and Ron Reagan. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, graduated near the top of his class, very accomplished, chosen by Admiral Rickover as the best of the best. He’d throw himself into the job. He was young and energetic and he’d give everything out and he got eaten alive in that job.

Ron Reagan hired a bunch of people. He kept it simple, went home early, went to sleep early. Because he kept it simple. I did that really poorly because I hadn’t done it before.

Angel Mehta: Could you give examples of things that you think entrepreneurs and small companies have a tendency to over-complicate in an organization as it grows?

Paul Margolis: One is evaluation and measurement, especially in smaller companies. People build very complicated evaluation and measurement systems that personally I think are distracting and then you see them struggle, struggle, struggle and struggle with the evaluation. Sure, each person’s decision is difficult and painful, but I think after you’ve done that kind thing for a while, you’re sort of good at it, and get comfortable with making the hard decisions fast. But the people who haven’t done it before find the whole thing scary. I think a lot of it is accepting that you’re going to make mistakes. At a certain point for me, a light bulb went on and I realized that I was going to make a lot of mistakes in decision-making and that’s fine as long as I sort of did it quickly and did the best job I could.

Angel Mehta: You’ve had the experiences now of an entrepreneur, an operating executive, and a venture capital investor. Which do you prefer?

Paul Margolis: Well I like being a venture guy because I’m personally better suited to it. A good venture capitalist is typically behind the scenes in a supporting role, so the kind of person who likes to be on stage, likes to be a leader, to be in control, or likes to get their arms around one thing and make it perfect is a terrible venture capitalist. In venture capital, if you’re doing it right, you’re not in control and not getting the recognition as you’re supposed to be giving that to the company. So you have to deal with the frustration of never getting to work on one thing until it is perfect.

I really like being an advisor. I don’t find it frustrating not being in control because I’ve already had my opportunity to be in control, and I don’t particularly need to be on the stage or in the limelight. I like working on a bunch of different things at the same time, so it sort of works really well for me. I think I’m better cast in the venture role than in the CEO role.

Angel Mehta: Fortune Magazine once did a feature called “The Best Advice I Ever Got.” How would you answer that question?

Paul Margolis: A guy I had on my team gave me a lot of advice about how to delegate and make sure that responsibility gets pushed down an organization and not allow the organization to push responsibility up. It was one of the most important lessons I ever learned.