Dharmesh Shah argues that co-founders and early team members matter more than product quality. Most startups fail because of market problems or team conflict, not bad products. The culture you build early shapes everything that comes after.
Yes, build a product, but people is the thing that will cause the startup to succeed or fail. And the culture is going to define who you bring in as a co-founder of the early team. And that's going to actually influence your overall probability of success more than most other things that you will do. Most of you will start companies where the likelihood that you're able to build a product is relatively high. That's going to be fine. What's really the kind of stopping point sometimes is either there's no market or you have a falling out with the early team. Those are like common causes of startup stagnation or failure.
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