I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example.
All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology.
Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.
Creating a startup isn't primarily technical. It's about business stuff - marketing, hiring, customer support, all sorts of soft skill things. All the clever code in the world won't make a startup succeed without the other stuff.
So really, "technical meritocracy" isn't what makes for successful startups. I think the concentration of technical founders in these parts gives us an unbalanced view.
Not heresy; it's risky. If you do it and stuff goes wrong, your boss will ask you wtf you hired this puny company and not a large one. No matter the reputation of the large one (bad or good) or the reputation of the small one (bad or good).
