(from the The Pmarca Guide to Startups, Marc Anderssen’s blog, in 2007)
Ouch:
Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.
Tim Shephard:
A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.
Andy Rachleffs Corollary of Startup Success:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
And Marc Anderssen’s conclusion:
once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit. Because, really, what else could it possibly be?