You are assuming a whole lot with that one. Even when I have had product people it's very rare that they are connected with the development team and a lot of times they are stacked adversely in a team under 10 people. Bridging the product to dev and back again gap is more than a full time job. More often than that situation I've found that there just isn't a product person. I would like to know where your assumptions find startups that aren't a clusterfuck because I need to check that blog or newsgroup or whatever.