A panel of startup icons proffered advice and anecdotal wisdom to an audience of upstart hopefuls today at the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco, much of which centered around the essentials of leadership in transitioning from concept to phenomenon.David Filo (left, co-founder of Yahoo), Chad Hurley (center, co-founder of YouTube), and Marc Andreessen (right, founder of Netscape and Opsware and co-founder of Ning) joined moderator Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital in a candid conversation regarding the difficulty and excitement of building a tech company in the Valley from the ground up. Each noted the point of inflection from fledgling operation to full-on marketable organization as the most trying time. And when asked for advice regarding ensuring a successful transition, Andreessen went right to the importance of having executive leadership on board from the get-go. “Have a founder who can be a CEO,” Andreessen advised. Conceding examples of startups that hired CEOs later in the maturation process to significant success, including Yahoo, Andreessen said, “There are many many many startups where there was no CEO on the founding team, where a professional CEO was hired and tubed the company.”And what makes CEO material? “The CEO’s job is a never-ending stream of bad news,” Andreessen noted. “You have to be able to absorb all that bad news and actually act on it without ever letting anything get to you emotionally.”The vitality of leadership in ensuring a successful startup pits Andreessen against the commonly held belief that CEOs are overvalued financially at most organizations.“I have a contrarian view on CEO compensation,” Andreesseen said, “which is it’s well-deserved because the level of stress that those people are under is not something most of us would want to put up with.” Yet for those striking out on their own, at least initially, there really isn’t any compensation to debate about, only the unmistakable need for someone to step into that executive role. For YouTube, it was Hurley.“You try to make that transition from the one building the product to building the business. That was the biggest thing I had to do,” said Hurley, who attributed inexperience as the secret to his success in making YouTube work.“Because I didn’t know what I was doing, we were able to do things a little bit differently,” Hurley said, adding that assembling the best team is the chief responsibility of the corner office, whether it’s in a garage or on the 75th floor. “If you do get the right people in place, you’re able to survive,” he advised.When it comes to hiring, Andreessen offered some colorful advice.“Beat off with a stick as hard as you can, hiring too many people too quickly,” he said. “Until you feel like you’ve achieved product/market fit, keep the team sizes as small as possible.” Hurley concurred that small teams improve a company’s ability to adjust to fluctuations in fast-moving fledgling markets. Yet he conceded that a thin roster in the face of fast-scaling opportunity was what ended up sealing YouTube’s acquisition fate — by all means a success, but for someone dedicated to venturing out on his own, a difficult choice to make. “If we had had more people on board [at the time] we were acquired,” Hurley began when asked about regrets before leaving the rhetorical essentially unfinished.Google ghosted its way into another thread about company fate and decision-making. “We never really understood the opportunity we had ahead of us,” Filo said, waxing nostalgic for the turmoil and excitement of the early days at Yahoo.“We certainly made a lot of decisions over the years that didn’t have the right long-term focus,” Filo confessed. “Compared with some of our competitors at that time, we thought we were making long-term decisions, but we still were … too focused on the short-term things and not building the right products, the right platforms, the right business structure to really get us through the next 10-plus years.”Yet when you’re starting a company as an alternative to completing your Ph.D. in part because your advisor left for sabbatical, how tough can you be on yourself for not taking a 10-year view from the outset. That said, the stakes are high in the Valley, and with the likes of Google down the street to contend with, the ability to read the long-range possibilities of markets as they emerge is essential.For example, Web apps?Perhaps the fact that Yahoo’s announcement of its Zimbra acquisition coincided nearly exactly with Filo’s admitted regret wasn’t coincidence after all. More TechCrunch40 coverage:• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild• Mobile virtualization gets smart • Google rep glib on enterprise play• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig? Technology Industry