1) Build Build Build<p>The MVP is a pretty well established item nowadays, this was much more true in the past but people have caught up to this long ago.<p>2) Fully Outsource Development<p>No start-up that I&#x27;m aware of would outsource all of their development, in fact, I don&#x27;t recall a single time over many years of a start-up that outsourced any development at all. Are there many examples of such start-ups?<p>3) The wrong technical cofounder<p>This I&#x27;ve seen. But I&#x27;ve also seen: the wrong person for sales and marketing, the wrong person for the CEO role, the wrong person for finance and so on. Start-ups are risky in part because there is a chance that one of the founders will not work out and that could easily kill the company if not detected and contained early enough. But that goes for any role, not just for the technical lead, and not more so for the tech lead than any of the others.<p>4) Spend, Spend, Spend<p>For that you have to have money first and most start-ups never get to the stage where they do and the ones that do usually have a bit of supervision on that account once they get the &#x27;big bucks&#x27;. During the .com boom this was different but nowadays start-ups are a lot more conservative when it comes to their spending than in the past.<p>All in all this essay would be more applicable 16 years ago than today.<p>There are common mistakes that founders make over and over again but these aren&#x27;t as common in my experience. Maybe that&#x27;s a geographical artifact.<p>A couple of common mistakes that I do see: failure to communicate clearly and often between founders, failure to accept responsibility, culture of blame, lack of preparation for changing circumstances, lack of proper definition of expectations, founders being in different phases of their lives with different risk profiles, NIH, trying to be both a platform <i>and</i> an application on that platform and so on. These I&#x27;ve seen, recently, and more than once and each and every one of those has the potential to wreck a start-up, even in a later phase.