I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.

Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.

In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.

Obsess about the quality of the product.