With higher responsibility also comes the risk of exposing the company to situations that a more practised individual would know to avoid. It'd be interesting to hear about how these companies mitigate risk from their armies of ambitious underlings.
Keep your focus on the first thing which will kill you.
Agreed 100%.
All of my friends who were bragging they were going to retire at 25 millionaires and then three months later were flat broke. They were so disenchanted with the startup scene, they all went to work for big corporations.
As I remember, nobody I knew wanted to work at a startup, let alone start a company in that environment. There was no money - VC or otherwise. You were left to bootstrap it yourself. If it had anything to do with the internet, you were toxic so even getting clients to support you was insanely hard.
The fact they came out of that crazy time and were able to prosper against all of those odds is really impressive.