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Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.

In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.

The challenge in a startup is you hit a lot of turbulence, and you want people who understand that it's just turbulence and not a crisis.

The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.

A startup is not just about the idea: it's about testing and then implementing the idea. A founding team without these skills is likely dead on arrival.

There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.

For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don't like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they've built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don't want to hear that anything's wrong with them.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.