Its funny - but for so many startup success stories, bubbles are the pink elephant in the room. When you try to draw lessons from success during downturns, the

Its funny - but for so many startup success stories, bubbles are the pink elephant in the room. When you try to draw lessons from success during downturns, the lessons are very different, and yet most thought leaders come from bubbles. This deeply effects the quality of the advice out there - most of it comes from people who are to some extent unknowing products of bubbles - but who attribute all of their success to actions they took that have universal applicability. When it often ain't so. For this reason, for me, 'startup credibility' goes up tremendously when it comes from a serial entrepreneur, or from someone that has actually built a cash-starved company to success during a downturn. "What can I do with very little?" and "What can I do if it is possible to raise $1 million?" are fundamentally different questions - and the same person isn't necessarily going to be skilled in both situations unless they've demonstrated that ability. Whereas this comment - it has the legitimacy of coming from a complete failure :D Finally... if your community leaders are state employees that can't say anything negative in public... you really need to be aware of that before you take their optimism at face value. Take to time to query them in private, to find out what they actually think. It might save you some mistakes and some grief.