I'll add to the "partner warning". It's incredibly important to pick the right people! I worked at a startup where one of the two partners was really good duri

I'll add to the "partner warning". It's incredibly important to pick the right people! I worked at a startup where one of the two partners was really good during the "garage phase", i.e. just two guys hacking away on a prototype. When the company grew, and developers were added to help out, it turned out that he was completely unable to grow into the role of development lead. Instead, he just stayed in his corner, grudgingly handing out assignments, never resolving discussions between developers etc. Never having even simple design discussions resolved, can really wear down a team. It's also important to have a great seed engineer, who will be in charge of creating the company's software development culture (Mentioned at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...). In the company mentioned above, the software development culture never got beyond the garage state; There were no design documents or meetings, no continuous integration, no quality assurance, no code reviews.... All things that the partner could / should have introduced into the development culture. The side-effects of this was a scarily buggy product, developers not being on the same page about central concepts of the product, design not being implemented uniformly between developers etc.