I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example. All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology. Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.