Unpopular but right is what you're going for.

The idea should come first, the startup should come second.

You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.

The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.

Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.

So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.

Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.