For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.

If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.

If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.

Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

People appreciate when you make an effort to speak their language.

I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.