An excellent staff is not built by bargaining down a potential employee, seeing how little you have to offer to get them to sign on the dotted line. That is almost a sure guarantee of job dissatisfaction and an untimely and probably acrimonious exit. It's also counter-productive to make extravagant claims about your startup to tempt the strongest talent; once you've lost their confidence by overstating the benefits, it's almost impossible to recover it.

Every startup business faces one crucial initial challenge: Capturing and retaining good employees. Without that key element, success can be very elusive. For Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, for instance, only 58 % of new companies are still in business after four years. In Retail, only 48% are still on their feet after four years. And with Information startups, only 37% are still running after four years.