I don't think he's referring to making the startup your full focus vs side project at the early stage; after all PG et al still advocate burning slow. Sometime

I don't think he's referring to making the startup your full focus vs side project at the early stage; after all PG et al still advocate burning slow. Sometimes a side project doesn't benefit by having you work on it 4–8x as many hours per week if you have the right prioritization in place in the first place. I think this is more concerned with things like media coverage, founder interviews, attending/panelling conferences, and things like that. I like how Sam Altman described it in Focus & Intensity from Startup Playbook [0]: > Don’t get caught up in early success—you didn’t get off to a promising start by going to lots of networking events and speaking on lots of panels. Startup founders who start to have initial success have a choice of two paths: either they keep doing what they’re doing, or they start spending a lot of time thinking about their “personal brand” and enjoying the status of being a founder. > It’s hard to turn down the conferences and the press profiles—they feel good, and it’s especially hard to watch other founders in your space get the attention. But this won’t last long. Eventually the press figures out who is actually winning, and if your company is a real success, you’ll have more attention than you’ll ever want. The extreme cases—early-stage founders with their own publicists—that one would think only exist in TV shows actually exist in real life, and they almost always fail. [0]: http://playbook.samaltman.com http://playbook.samaltman.com