Nothing is more important than your team. If you were to poll early-stage Silicon Valley investors and successful entrepreneurs, and then you did a weighted average on the importance of "team," you'd likely find that 90% of the value (and likelihood of investment) lies in the team. The team includes your co-founder(s), your first hires, and your advisors or investors.
I keep running into companies--both startups and mature businesses--that exhibit a disappointing level of confusion about who they really are (or who they're trying to be). Whether it's engineers contemplating what product features to focus on next, or the marketing team arguing over what to say on social media and how precisely to say it, an ambiguous emotional fog often permeates the space where a clear structure ought to stand. This is bad. Very bad.
