Don't listen to your parents.
The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial.
Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.
Do things that won't scale; it will teach you.
It's better to have 100 people love you than to have 1,000,000 people like you.
I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.