If you come to a fork in the road, take it

Infonautics was in the right place in the right time -- but made some wrong decisions. We were so locked into our initial strategy and vision that we were unwilling to "pivot" in response to changes in the market. We had all of the necessary ingredients (funding, search technology, data center, hardware, engineering team, and consumer interface) but were unwilling to change the recipe.

Some of the most successful companies have been "pivots". PayPal started out as a service to beam money through Palm Pilots, while YouTube was originally a video dating site. The truth is that early stage ventures are all about experimentation and iteration. As soon as it's written, every business plan is wrong. Good entrepreneurs recognize this, and tend to build agile teams that can quickly respond to early market information in order to identify a real business model and minimize risk.

via Redeye VC