When attempting to make a startup successful, you get conflicting advice from people:

“Have a strong vision and follow unwaveringly it to the end.”
“Be adaptable and use customer development to adapt your product”

“You dont need venture capital, bootstrap!”
“Getting capital is one of the best things you could do to accelerate your startup”

“Tell as many people as you can about your idea”
“Dont tell anyone your idea, they will steal it!”

As usual, the truth is somewhere between the extremes.  The vision can change based on your understanding.  Capital is good, because it allows mortgages to be paid, children and family to be properly clothed and fed, and day jobs to be left behind in pursuit of the dream.  On the other hand, how much of your dream are you willing to sell for the comfort of cash?

Customers can be your biggest adversary and your biggest idea factory.  Ditto for partners.  In talking to partners, when they say, “It would be really cool if….”, you need to listen close, because more often than not what they are really saying is “I would pay you to solve this problem.”  In a nutshell, thats what a business is, an algorithm that takes a problem as an input and as an output spits out money.

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