If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.
It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.
The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.