You seem to have found your destiny. Why do you even care what other people think/do? I would say: follow your path perseveringly and you will end up fine. Not having the urgent need to think about the "investor route" is a good thing. Everybody additionally involved is going to meddle one way or another.
The prohibition of minarets does not have anything to do with religious freedom. You can build as many mosques as you want and you are free to pray to anyone you like. It's only the minarets (the towers on top of the mosques) that most swiss people dislike because they just don't fit in the landscape.
Of course, this prohibition is an overreaction (there are only a handful of minarets already and building restrictions are strict in general), but I can understand that people think that "Heidiland" isn't supposed to look like ... e.g. Istanbul.
Probably not in general, but concerning architecture I would tend to say yes. Isn’t it an important part of “postmodern architecture” to melt premodern/traditional designs with modern ones? So, conservative ideas/values seem to have some influence.
I would especially check up on the persistency of the founders. Are they really dedicated to the product/company or are they going to lose interest if either VC money is used up, they have not become rich after a few months or there are harder times ahead for some other reason?
It usually takes years to build a really cool company/product, so I would make sure that I’m not the only one still putting his best effort into that project after the initial euphoria has faded away and the others are doing not much more than just hanging around … or even worse: start bitching.
Actually, the US isn't a net exporter anymore. You are importing far more of value than you export (2009: +45%, 2008: +66%) and that is the problem.
How are you going to pay the people abroad that dig in the dirt for copper that you actually need? Currently, the US as a whole does pay with promises (debt).
There are at least about 10 companies the size of Microsoft missing to fill that gap.
According to CIA World Factbook, you're not the largest in terms of percentage of GDP. At least Germany, Japan, Italy and even Switzerland rank better in that metric.
All of these single-metric comparisons are flawed. E.g. the world largest manufacturer? In comparison to what? Germany, a country with a labor force that is over 3 times smaller than the labor force in the US?
PPP is indeed a silly measure as practiced. McDonalds has almost no competitors in Switzerland (no In&Out, Jack, TacoBell or Subway across the street) - therefore a BigMac costs at least 5 times more than in the US.
There are other measures that suck as well - e.g. external debt. OMG, Switzerland, Monaco and Luxembourg are completely screwed ... or are these popular banking places, that own foreign investors money that they actually are hording and did not spent it in the Looney-Tunes store at the local mall?
I looked through a bunch of these when I was approached to make an enterprise level IMS for a large chemical company (30,000+ employees). The software is not complicated, but because of the use of the word "innovation" it becomes rather pricey, very quickly especially when you charge by the seat. I put together a prototype for them, but lost the tender in the end. But its this prototype which I am adapting to put on my website.
And they need to make a good amount of money to "feed" 20 people after they exhausted the funding. Think of it this way: you need at least 95% less sales to make the same profit per person (implied you sold your app for the same price).
