Last week, Jason Mendelson came and gave a fantastic talk at Techstars in Boulder on all the things you can do to screw up your company.  According to Jason, there are 18 things and most of them are not fixable!  I’m including his list below.

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Jason’s 18 things that can royally screw your startup…

1. Pick a bad team
2. Pick a bad idea
3. Pick bad advisors
4. Be arrogant
5. Don’t know your business model
6. Don’t understand your competition
7. Staff up & hire too quickly ahead of revenue (aka, spend too much!)
8. Don’t constantly test your hypothesis
9. Don’t stay on top of your PR & press relations
10. Overpromise & underdeliver!
11. Not paying attention to people’s incentives (this is a really good section, watch the video for details!)
12. Screw up your cap table
13. Screw up your IP
14. Not having defined goals and not knowing how to define success
15. Not firing people fast enough
16. Not knowing what you can control, and what you can’t.
17. Not holding yourself accountable
18. Figure you can do the ‘lawyer’ stuff later (hello 83b!!!)