General Info - What Causes Success

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And so you start to wonder -- what correlates the most to success? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure -- what's most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?

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Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required.

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.

(I'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else -- just that judging from what I've seen in successful startups, you can.)

Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.

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