Having been through multiple launches, seen companies launch at big conferences, and talked with many startups that have experienced the same effect, what I recommend – and what we’re doing at Origami - is not launching at all. Take the word launch out of your vocabulary – it’s a sign that you are gambling on your app and not building a long-term, sustainable company. Instead, put your sign-up page up or your app out because you need more feedback on your idea. Find an audience of passionate users, even if small, and reach out to their community through appropriate means. Try SEM and Facebook ads to find a target market. Experiment with business models and onboarding flows. Let the press come to you because they love what you’ve made.

Based on painful personal experience, this article illustrates the limitations of the Lean Startup theory and how it distracts founders from the fundamentals of successful entrepreneurship – the unlean lessons. It also explains how to overcome the theory’s shortcomings. Read on and learn how to protect yourself from wasting time and money on building unprofitable products and uncompetitive companies.

An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.

If you are a small software company, you have got a much better chance of getting a decent sized chunk of a small market, than 1% of a huge market. As a general rule of thumb, I would say pick a market for which you have got a decent chance of getting in the top ten Google results for important search terms (power laws again). You can even do this by going after a small segment of a big market. e.g. a CRM solution aimed at companies that trade on EBay. Or perhaps a CRM solution aimed at companies that trade on EBay in the Spanish-speaking market. You can always broaden your focus if you are successful in a small market. Whatever you do, don’t stand in front of investors and pitch them the 1% fallacy. It makes you look an idiot. I should know, because I’ve done it.

There are plenty of myths floating around Silicon Valley, augmented by the legends of hot-headed young Turks such as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, that you need to be in your 20s with a rigid mindset and a hefty ego. But they're the outliers, according to an extensive survey conducted by one startup incubator. [...] The results? As you can see in the infographic below, the young Turk thing is a myth. The best entrepreneurs are ones who work in their field first, gaining valuable real-world knowledge and experience for a decade or more. (We heard exactly the same thing from Google's startup acquisition guy).

Innovation may slow at public companies because IPOs trigger “brain drain” as employees cash in their holdings, the study suggests. By tracking about 13,000 of the inventors named in patent filings, Bernstein found that they were 18% more likely to leave after a company went public. Meanwhile, those who stayed behind produced inventions that were less valuable than before, receiving on average 48% fewer citations per patent.

WePay is a Y Combinator-backed startup originally formed mostly to make it easier for groups to collect money and make payments together. But it’s recently gone beyond just helping out groups, providing an ultra-simple platform for anyone to collect and manage payments online. It’s added support for event registration and ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, and e-commerce. A few weeks ago, it even rolled out a white-label payments API and lowered its prices to court third-party developers and better compete against PayPal and others.

Now the company is making it even easier for websites to collect money, sell goods, or receive donations, by offering up a way to accept payments right on a client’s website. For site owners, adding a WePay Payment Button is as easy as embedding a YouTube video — they merely add a small cut-and-paste piece of code to the site.

For all this, I don’t intend to argue that people shouldn’t join startups. If the offer’s good, and the job looks interesting, it’s worth trying out. I just don’t think that the current, unconditional “startups are awesome!” mentality serves us well. It’s not good for any of us, because there’s no tyrant worse than a peer selling himself short, and right now there are a lot of great people selling themselves very short for a shot at the “startup experience”– whatever that is.

Here are 7 misconceptions about startups that I’d like to dispel.

Startup incubators don’t guarantee that your startup will be successful when you leave the program after three months — although the big profile programs do hint at success through association. Still, when founders discuss incubators, the conversation focuses on which incubator programs they should apply for. Instead, founders need to seriously weigh if participating in an incubator program is a good fit at all.

After a brief, failed experiment paying me to do chores, my dad tried something really neat. It clearly took a bit of legwork, but maybe there are some transferrable lessons for parents who want to lay an entrepreneurial foundation.

He gave me a vending machine.

He rented the machine, found a location in a local workshop, and installed it. And then he told me two things.

1. That this would be the last time I was given allowance.

2. And that if I wanted to have any pocketmoney next week, I’d better spend this week’s on some inventory.