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In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.

Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.

Start-ups often die in the first 18 to 24 months because of formative mistakes, like choosing a bad co-founder or the wrong corporate entity or an inappropriate platform. Ninety percent of the companies the Founder Institute has created are alive because we've helped them avoid those mistakes.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.