1. Most important thing for startups is to focus as they  dont die of starvation but they die of indigestion.
2. It needs to offer a pain killer not a vitamin to its customers.
3. You need to innovate besides technology on your business model, in the software arena software as a service did that.
4. You need to have some kind of unfair advantage in customer acquisition (network effect, viral loops or even doing unfair generation of demand what youtube did and we know how they did it)
5. To monetize you need to have huge scale or a highly monetizeable category otherwise anything in the middle is death.
6. Till you reach scale where you need a lot of money for servers and  bandwidth, you dont really need a lot of money. If you think you need a lot of money for marketing then you are making a mistake.
7. Do NOT focus on engineering and optimizing viral loops.
8. Do NOT focus on things like contact importer or spaming users as your method of customer acquisition.
9. DO focus on core values that potentially becomes better as more users use it.
10. DO focus on core behaviors like warning to share the content that you are originating or creating.
11. DO focus on allowing people to give feedback whether it is the content that is created by other users or it is the content that is created by you.
12. If you look where the internet is growing, it in the emerging overseas markets which excludes US, Europe and Japan. Rest of the world is growing by almost 2x the numbers of the developed world.
13. A people hire A people, Bs hire Cs and Cs hire Ds.
14. Needs to be extremely capital efficient as very few companies going to have exits above 200M$. Most of the startups are exiting between 50-100M$.

Source: The Internet