> If you’re at a startup, your product is your business.

Your product is whatever you end up with after the long tenuous period of being startup, which often evolves/pivots drastically over time. Your product is your ability to execute.

Depends if the product is a key profit center. If your startup is making a product and it's not a profit center, it might get binned, it might get pivoted, it might postponed. The advice is great, just don't die on a shortsighted engineering hill when the decision come from emotional attachment to your work rather than what's best for the companies positioning and financial health. You can always put that love and energy into a new/pivoting of the product.

The problem is if you're at a startup you probably don't know what your product is, because you don't know who your customers are.

My last startup died because we committed too hard to the product and the business model, which while innovative and one that I still believe could have succeeded - we utterly failed because we didn't understand our customers and we didn't pivot fast enough, ran out of runway and then everyone but the founders got laid off. Waiting on hearing about the equity.