Top founders know a secret when it comes to hiring and fundraising: give prospective employees and investors homework and make them earn it.

Every startup is a unique microcosm. Investors who think they can pattern match every new portfolio company are mistaken. Founders who believe they can insert an old formula that worked in a previously successful company they ran or were involved with may run into trouble.

Investing in early stage companies is hard. Firm criteria for making good investments shouldn’t be. Every investor has a different flavor of how he or she invests. We like to keep it simple at Promus Ventures and focus on basic blocking and tackling.

I am hard pressed to find one reason why this staggering growth is a bad thing. The world is rapidly building these fantastic mini-ecosystems that serve as on-ramps to the Startupalooza Highway.

Too Much Too Soon = Disco Inferno. Early enterprise adoption success shouldn’t always translate to massive additional funding.

Just as investors fire a long list of questions at startup teams (do they ever stop asking questions), founders can and should do the same with doting investors.

I believe every startup should dream big, be tenacious, iterate always, and change the world. But whether in plenty or in want, RIGHT NOW every startup on planet earth should take their entire core team to the mirror and ask themselves these questions:

I recently sat on a plane coming back from SFO and was forced to listen (for three hours plus) to a vc and startup founder in back of me loudly wax poetic about a wide range of opinions about other VCs and startups. These people should have known better, and knowing some of these companies and investors, some of their info was just wrong.

In computer science jargon, the “software stack” is software that sits on top of a system’s core kernel (or operating system). The stack gives a feature set to the operating system, expands it function and makes it sing. The more layers a developer adds to the stack, the more enriching the experience and usability of the platform.

Equity can get doled out in early days like candy thrown from a parade to anyone and everyone because that’s the only currency that founders can afford to pay. We see the following situations occur more than we like…