The hardest part from my perspective is keeping focus on the fact that you need actual, live customers to keep everything going. I don't know about others, but

The hardest part from my perspective is keeping focus on the fact that you need actual, live customers to keep everything going. I don't know about others, but I find myself increasingly putting tech aside and riding the ass of the sales teams at smaller tech companies. It's really hard to keep going on a roadmap when you have nothing to validate it against. As you grow a company, it is very easy to get drawn into the politics of org charts, teams and policies. You do need some of this, but if you are adding middle management layer at 12 employees you might be on a non-ideal path. Everything always seemed to fall into place automatically when things were going well with the customer pipeline. Pressure from actual, paying customers is the magic trick for a healthy company. Without this, you will invent fake non-problems to solve. This is where virtually all of the drama and bad technology choices come from in my experience.