I love this essay... I feel the same pain when I realize that the future we predicted in the past will not see the light at least until I am alive... But I really blame the current trend in innovation... There is immense growth in computer science but all in wrong direction. Instead of working on real world problems, we (esp. talented folks out of stanford, mit) are working on social networking and photo sharing apps and calling it as innovation. Robotics, AI and ML are the real tech innovations that we need to focus on.
You guys are awesome. I tried to do this many times. Dedicate 50% of time on consulting gigs and another 50% on my startup. But unfortunately, what usually happens is, I spend 150% on consulting gigs either to meet the deadlines or get greedy for the amount of money I make doing so (I was working by the hour) and my startup's MVP never see the light and eventually I get demotivated from the original idea and get diverted to something new. What's more ironic is, after sometime I hear about xyz company raising some money for the same idea I was working on few months/year ago.
I don't necessarily blame facebook for this but it is true and hurting that today's innovation is all about so called 'social media'. Although it has its good implications, I feel its doing more bad than good to the society. Like the article, I don't blame VCs either. I just wish to see cars flying around before I die... and for that to happen, focus needs to be made on real world problems and not on what your friend's friend bbq picnic turned out.
I started getting into Objective-C while learning iOS app development... at first, I struggled a lot because of my approach to writing obj-c code like I write c# code... once I dropped that mentality, took a fresh retrospect... I have become its (obj-c) fan!
Thats a great list to avoid... but why not partnerships? Specially when working on a B2B platform, I believe its important to build relationships from the get go.