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Square’s primary challenge in early 2012 is to find more customers in other parts of the world, first in Latin America and then in parts of Asia and Europe.

The prospect of pivoting down the line can encourage entrepreneurs to pursue a passion to build without evaluating their hypotheses up front

But successful ventures don't just dive into a single direction, confident that if they're wrong they can drastically change course. The reality is that a single concept is a collection of variables expressed as a whole. Some are core to the vision, while others are educated guesses.

Sketching or mocking up experiential prototypes and then testing them with consumers or potential partners, while also explicitly jotting down your operating and business assumptions and using them to discuss the business with industry experts, allows you both to pick a promising route to invest in the development sprint and to pivot with confidence.

The international angle, Rimer says, is becoming an increasingly common early priority: “Companies have to think from day one about international,” says Rimer. He says that this is because the biggest competitive factor among many of them these days is scale: “A lot of tech startups from the last five to seven years have been less about technology innovation and more about the right service or software that has found a good fit. It’s much more replicable, and so they have to make sure that they conquer the international opportunity very early on.”