Ask HN: Starting a Science-Focused Startup

I certainly have my own thoughts on the topic (based on my experience). However, I would like to hear opinions, experiences, best practices and lessons learned from other people, especially those who have gone through starting and/or working at science-focused startups.

Brief background. I've been planning to start a science-focused startup for quite a long time. I think that I've reached the point when it is feasible for me (still need more time to crystallize and clearly formulate important aspects to myself). The eventual product would be delivered a SaaS platform with baked-in secret sauce as unique selling proposition and a core strategy focused on differentiation as a competitive advantage (I know the competition pretty well). Potential customers will include teams or organizations in academia (universities), industry (mostly commercial companies) and government (national labs). The platform's core users would be researchers and engineers in a specific, but very large and diverse, domain (the latter presents both challenges and opportunities).

Please share your thoughts on the following specific areas of interest:

- hiring / team formation;

- funding (I want to go - at least initially - the SBIR/STTR route [I have experience of working on proposals, including for NSF] or, if that fails, bootstrapping; I'm not a fan of rapid/hyper/blitz-scaling and, as a consequence, VC funding, unless it's absolutely necessary);

- co-founder relations, company culture (e.g., full transparency a la Buffer or not);

- advisor relations;

- IP (e.g., trade secrets vs. patents - I'm leaning toward preferring the former);

- technology stacks / cloud / platform architecture (e.g., multi-tenant vs. multi-instance, APIs - REST vs. GraphQL, Kubernetes);

- platform adoption (I want to growth organically, with a minimal sales team);

- strategy (business models, competition, marketing, pricing).

Your feedback will be much appreciated!