The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.

A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.

These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.

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.

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.