> Get the Team Right
> Be Wary of Founding With Friends
I think I remember Marc Andreesen writing that the best way to start a startup is when a pre-gelled team meets a new opportunity. Can't find the blog entry in question, but he suggested that any other founding scenario has drastically lower odds of success.
I thought I had a fairly strong team, with 4 other guys that I'd known (and been fairly close to) in college. Over the year we worked, they all dropped away, one by one. They just had better opportunities come up, and when it comes to the actual daily grind, startups...kinda suck. I'm lucky; I escaped with all the relationships intact, probably stronger than they were before, and one of them just sent me a job offer last month to come work with him (hmm, I wonder if that still stands, in light of the recent financial crisis ;-)). A lot of that came from deliberately taking the short end of the stick on many occasions, eg. I put in the lions share of work and did not take a leadership position. Many others aren't so lucky, and lose their friends in addition to their startup.
I'd also add that it's really important to have worked with people on a project, not just in social settings, and for them all to be on the same page regarding what they want with their life. A lot of people really want to be an employee: they can't deal with the uncertainty and random bad luck that comes with being in a startup. It's a losing strategy to try and force them into a startup; it's not good either for them or for your startup.
> Connect With People to Thrive
I was a little skeptical of this: when I wrote up my postmortem, one of my lessons was "If you're doing anything other than building your product or getting users, you're wasting your time." But there's always the possibility that I'm the one who's wrong: after all, we both killed our startups. ;-)
I think, in hindsight, that I'd look at it this way: Don't expect to get anything out of networking if you don't have a kickass product. However, don't expect to get anything out of networking anyway. If you do it without any expectations whatsoever, just taking an interest in the people around you, you might build some useful connections.
The other thing that struck me: it seems like your startup dissolved before it got to the daily grind of actually trying to build something people want. And that's the part that's really depressing. I never thought that emotional stability would be the limiting factor in startups, but ultimately, that's what killed mine. I remember talking to a coworker who'd previously done a few startups, before starting one, and he told me "Make sure you come out with your sanity intact." I quit because I felt like that was slipping away, and I was becoming someone I didn't really want to be.