> Then I realized that most of the startups were indistinguishable from one another: nearly everyone was following the same destructive trends which are bad for

> Then I realized that most of the startups were indistinguishable from one another: nearly everyone was following the same destructive trends which are bad for employees and bad for products This is rich coming from the founder of a startup that's indistinguishable from all the other coding bootcamp, MooC startups out there with a dash Deep Learning thrown in to make it extra trendy. As for the actual advice, I think it's pretty hit or miss. > 1. Venture Capital Nothing in her description of VC is wrong here. But the lesson: "VC is to be avoided" is an oversimplification. VC money is a tool. It's not always the right tool, and it certainly has its downsides. But it has its upsides too. In many cases it's the only way to get a business off the ground. > 2. Hypergrowth I don't really know where the author puts the line between hypergrowth and just growth, as PG has said: starts are growth. They must always be growing, is there such thing as too much growth? Maybe, if really bad things are happening in the company because of the growth like people are burning out and quitting... but really that's only bad because eventually it will hurt growth. So I think the simple lesson is grow as fast as possible, don't be short sighted. > 3. Trying to be “like a family” This one I agree with. Trying to be like a family in a professional setting is dishonest, and eventually the truth of the situation becomes clear. It's better to be honest from the start. > 4. Attempting to productionize a PhD thesis We'll have to tell Larry Page he's wasting his time trying to turn that dumb Page Rank thesis into a company. There are a lot of companies that fail this way and there are a lot of PhD theses that shouldn't be commercialized but people try none the less. As with all things startups, there's a thousand failures for every success and the only way to tell the difference is to actually found the company. > 5. Hiring a bunch of academic researchers The only company I've really observed doing this is Google and it seems to have worked out for them. I can easily believe that their are companies out there that higher a bunch of researchers to do a job they're not really capable of doing. I've also known academic researchers who were able to have a huge impact in the role they were hired for even though it wasn't really research. The general statement of this is that you needed to hire people for roles they want to and can perform. Researchers might be a particular anti-pattern in this but it's far from the only one.