Do Things that Don't Scale
This bums me out.  Majorly.  I work at a YC startup (which will remain nameless), and we function exactly the opposite of how this essay suggests.  We aren't huge by any means, but we focus heavily on scale, and suppress ideas that do not scale. <i>Automate everything. Nothing should be manual</i>.<p>I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic  customer service.  While building an iPhone app, I suggested that users should have easy access to our hotline at every step of the purchase and post-purchase flow in case they ran into issues.  The founder rejected this.  Why? "People would be calling us constantly".  We also spent enormous amounts of time and resources tweaking the app design to perfection (pre-launch), and attempted a massive press launch with exclusive blog posts/coverage while turning our noses at any sort of manual user acquisition.<p>Fast forward 6 months.  That product failed.