Startup advice - focus!

It's not just apartment-bound startups that fall victim to this, either. Kosmix, which is a well funded science project that's fooled itself into thinking it can be a major player in search, wrote its own data store in C++. It's basically a clone of Google's GFS because hey, if Google's doing it, then we should too, right? Who knows how much time, energy, and money was wasted on this thing, but that's all time, money, and energy that could go into making their final product not such a joke.