Advice for a young entrepreneur

I was most nervous about including "Focus on the right things" since it's such a wishy-washy idea. But I think it's core and comes from two camps that I really admire, Steve Blank with Customer Development and 37signals with Getting Real.

Great advice.

I had the pleasure of working at CrowdVine for some part of last year and I really learned a lot from Tony and the team there. Sometimes I missed them :P

This is actually a brilliant counter-example of what not to do. :D

I can think of many services that have rapidly outgrown their ability to serve pages to the users in a seamless fashion (people regularly complain about reddit, though I don't recall encountering it myself (but then I'm only on reddit rarely), and people complain about twitter (were they the guys with the fail whale?)). And various blogging software also spits its lunch (wordpress?)

Then you have MySQL which regularly died under load. I think it's better now than it used to be.

I guess the counter-counter example is that even if your technology foundations are crappy you can still become popular if the service is compelling enough to override minor quibbles like 'stability' and 'scalability' (don't tell the architects I said that :D )

It may go without saying, but this is also advice for an older entrepreneur.

Armando, thanks! It was so great to work with you as well. It'll take me all year to release your designs. Let me know if you ever have availability again. I would recommend you in an instant!