Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk, writer and founder of Brazen Careerist.

In a meeting last week one of our investors, fed up with a recent pivot, said, “Guys, this is not a science project.”

Everyone in the meeting who actually works at the company said, “Yes, it is.”

Because a startup is a science project.  A startup is not just a smaller version of a big business. A startup is a company that doesn’t know what business it’s in. A startup is doing something so big, reaching so far outside the box, that the people running the company are not totally sure what they are doing.

This is why diversity is bad in a very early-stage startup – when there are fewer than five people at the company.

Diversity in this case—the diversity you do not want in your start-up–is a diverse frame of reference. Diversity means having such different reference points that reaching consensus is a challenge. (Racial diversity is an antiquated idea and I won’t address it here.)

I know a lot about diversity because I grew up as a rich Jewish kid just north of Chicago, and I married a Born-Again Christian farmer in rural Wisconsin. We were both 40 when we married. I had lived in Chicago, Boston, LA and New York. He had lived with his parents for nearly his whole life.

We learn from each other constantly, because we approach problems so differently. We constantly have to rethink why we do everything, because our partner asks us constantly: Why?

You do not want this in a startup. In a startup, during the fragile time between when you think of the idea and when you get to the A round, you are likely to go under. You are likely to not move fast enough and therefore run out of money.

A startup at the very beginning is about time and money. You need to get time in order to be able to do the