Brett gave a great presentation today, sharing his experiences and trajectory developing www.onlyinpgh.com  and Scenable. My three take-away points were 1) Believe in yourself and your mission and let that conviction guide you like the "Pole/North Star" 2) Product development is hard. hence design your product/service (prototype) and test as soon as possible 3) In order to accomplish #2, Start small with what you know best, in a location that you know and care most about.

I reflected on his and Prof Zak's comments re: Mike Tyson's statement about receiving a "punch in the face". I found this article
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669246/a-small-businessmans-guide-to-innovating-like-the-pros
which led me to this site
http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/beating-the-odds-when-you-launch-a-new-venture.cfm
There is a link to an excellent Harvard Business Review article pdf that I hope you all read. It describes how to test assumptions and manage risks categorized by the authors into three categories - deal-killer risks (test and identify first), Path-dependent risks and high return-on-investment risks along the way. There is an excellent graph that shows how value rises when risks are mitigated in the correct sequence through test market (as opposed to the assumptions in a business plan).

I'm reconsidering reducing the scope and scale of my proposed venture considerably after listening to today's and presentation and reading the article above, to test my assumptions and hypotheses in a pilot.