Is this advice actually helpful? I feel like if I were considering a start-up I’d still have just as many questions after reading what amounts to, “If you want to be great, you need to … be great.”
So really the advice is, be born into the right family, or at least get into to the right university, join the Good Old Boys network, and fail upwards. The old "two dropouts in a garage" idea of a startup immortalized by Steves Jobs and Wozniak is very much a romanticized 20th century phenomenon. Nowadays it's more like the old East Coast financial world of clubs and school ties, albeit with a different uniform of jeans and hoodies.
I wouldn’t exactly consider being acquired for $43M a failure.
This post may not be the most in depth thing in the world, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who could learn something from it.
But I wish I had read the bits about cofounders and exec teams.
The number of pitched battles I had about management processes in my pre-revenue, pre-customer, barely-there startup took so much of my time, while I was just trying to get the product out the door so we could sign people up.
I definitely chose the wrong parters... and it definitely sunk the company.