The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them.

The quality of a startup's product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it

The size of a startup's market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team.

On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products.

In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup.

when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.

in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail.

The #1 company-killer is lack of market.

Markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are.

Tim Shephard: "A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product."

The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required.