Great post! Sometimes street smarts can take a while to sink in (or be rediscovered). I founded a company in 1999 and left a very staid old (low margin) industry to do so. The founder of my prior company had boostrapped it over 25 years into a $100M business and I learned a lot about how to run a lean and successful business from him. That all went out the window when we took venture capital in 1999. Every board member was on top of our management team to hire every consultant and headhunter we could find so we could “push out product out to the market” and “grab attention and market share” and “staff up”. I guess on the one hand they were right, because as Steve Blank says “in a bubble, get liquid”. With another round or two and a bunch more employees and some semi-useful software, I guess we could have emulated Ariba, Commerce One, or one of the other ecommerce/vertical market companies that never really had a solution that solved ANY significant problems but managed to make the employees rich, but we missed that window by about 6-12 months. That did not end well! Fast forward to my next two companies where we “recovered our street smarts” and bootstrapped and had to find early customers to make ends meet, and that discipline forced us to develop stuff that people would actually pay for. The flip side to that is that bootstrapping and trying to find quickly addressable markets can cause you to go after small markets/solutions that can’t result in the kind of home run you dream of as an entrepreneur. I guess there is a happy medium in there where street smarts combine with thinking big and if you look hard enough (maybe that is an element of street smarts as well) you find an addressable entry point to a large market. That way you get early traction but can grow into a situation where you can grab the brass ring in the large market. Again, thanks for the post and the series!