7 ms·

Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

39 points by deppp 6y ago

Aeolun 6y ago
If they took good advice, they wouldn’t be founders :/
fogetti 6y ago
I guess they don't take good advice because the advice isn't good? The author doesn't give any reasons to think otherwise.
yadco 6y ago
It could be "Why Most People Don’t Take Good Advice" The 3 reasons listed apply to a lot of people.
rudiv 6y ago
"Hire slow, fire fast" is a great example of valleyspeak that may seem horrible to someone who doesn't already know it is.
- duxup 6y ago
  And is super easy to say, but doing it well is an entirely different thing. And probably has nothing to do with your startup failing or succeeding.
drewcoo 6y ago
Title should be "Why Founders Don't Listen to Me." Answer is deflection: founders just aren't as smart as the author.
kristofferR 6y ago
And don't forget that founders are bombarded with what is proclaimed to be "good advice", including "Don't try, get a stable job instead" and a ton of directly conflicting advice. It quickly becomes incredibly hard to discern what is actually good advice for your situation to what is bad advice with good intentions, especially without the lived experience.
- adventured 6y ago
  One of the most important lessons I learned early on as an entrepreneur is the concept of well-qualified advice. When you're green, it's natural to seek advice from people you trust, people you think are smart, people with a lot of life and or business experience, family members, and so on. In most cases their advice is either going to be too general to be useful or they're going to have no knowledge and experience at what you're specifically working on, your domain, so their advice is far more likely to be dangerous. Those people will want to help, people like to be asked for advice, it feels nice; I think most people like to hear themselves talk, it's a normal thing. Their intentions will be good. I also think it's common for people to not have a good grasp of where their expertise ends and where their weakly-supported opinions begin (something everyone is guilty of at times). If you ask for an opinion, input, advice, you're likely to get it, even if the person isn't very qualified to offer it. So it's important to be very selective about who you seek advice from, making sure that they're in a position to offer valuable insight to what exactly you are dealing with.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    This, so much. I love being asked for advice, and love handing it out. It's so much easier to see the problems in someone else's business than it is in my own. Whether that's good advice or not is debatable. And as an aside, about the "right people" to get advice from: I love that concept of finding a mentor who is only just ahead of you, and therefore is solving the mistakes that you're just about to make.
    - lambdatronics 6y ago
      > finding a mentor who is only just ahead of you, and therefore is solving the mistakes that you're just about to make. This is gold! I used to buy into the idea that small colleges were a better learning environment for students due to the increased interaction with professors (class sizes ~30 vs 300). However, with younger TA's leading discussion sections, I changed my mind. I've seen professors who totally didn't understand the conceptual problem a student was having because the professor had crossed that bridge 30 years ago and forgot about it.
petargyurov 6y ago
I think the whole article can be summed up with this: > This is no different than when growing up and you used to ignore your parents advice because you think you know better To learn some things you have to experience them, often multiple times. That's why making mistakes is the most valuable part of any experience. I have made a tonne of mistakes so far, a lot of them because I was disillusioned at the time -- but disillusionment is a double-edged sword -- it can be the catalyst a lot of people need when starting a company.
timavr 6y ago
People who give a great advice can back it up by data, logical explanation, operational experience and are aware of their limitations. People who give bad advice are people who repeat the people above, but without relevant background. It is not about the audience, it is about the messenger.
doctor_eval 6y ago
Good advice is only actionable when it's also timely. "Hire slow and fire fast", for example, is not helpful advice for a founder who's still trying to get seed funding -- hiring is a problem they want to have. So the advice is good but they're not likely to remember it. You can't expect someone to squirrel away every bit of good advice, just waiting for a time when it's useful. I mean, there are plenty of times when I've slapped my head and said, "Oh, that's what they were talking about"... but mostly they told me when I didn't have the problem, and then I remembered too late :-\ Also, this pissed me off: > But due to the depth of knowledge and experience here in Silicon Valley, there are many high quality people who do give great advice I may live in Lower Fartville, but... really?
- watwut 6y ago
  I worked in a company that fired fast and it created a lot of insecurity. People were really wary of disagreeing with anyone remotely in more authority. They covered mistakes instead of fixing them and did everything to not look like they made a mistake. Dont hold off firing that needs to be done, but fire has did not seemed to be too good strategy.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    Yeah - to be clear I was referencing another post with that quip. Like most advice, it’s got some merit, but reality is much more complicated. Kinda the point of these posts really!
ransom1538 6y ago
Building a successful startup is %90 luck and %10 hard work. People seek advice from people that are successful. That is why receiving startup advice is so stupid. Being successful in the startup world is mainly luck with a sprinkle of grit. The analogy would be interviewing a lottery winner on how "they did it". The advice is worse than nothing at all. Here is the irony: Advice from people that fail at startups IS useful and actionable - but people don't like to listen to those people. EG. Munchery. If they had started in 2020 during covid they would be a billion dollar company. They started in 2011 and failed terribly. Luck. IF they had been successful, and did launch in 2020, the advice from this CEO would be horrible. "Hire top talent, etc" Because* the only reason they did succeed was due to timing - and that advice wouldn't be seen or given.
- zpeti 6y ago
  We have some real scientific insight here. I’m also sure you are a super successful entrepreneur and so definitely know it’s 90% luck.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    Your trying to use their premise to insult them, but to do that you need to actually understand and keep within the premise. The error that you have made being that in the scenario presented, the successful entrepreneur does not know that luck is the main reason for their success. A better zinger would be something in the lines of suggesting that the poster only knows all this because of how acutely they have failed. Just as you have.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    We do have some scientific insight because we have several control groups, aka accelerators. If it wasn't mostly luck, accelerators would have an improved success rate, because they are selected by experienced people based on judgement calls about their likelihood of succeeding [0]. Accelerators actually have, at best, a very minor improvement on the base success rate. Therefore we can safely conclude that startup success is mostly luck. [0] Of course, this is using a definition of success that is more than just getting investment. I would define it as "becoming a sustainable business". But that would exclude things like Uber and Twitter that are not sustainable (yet), but are undeniably successful.
dagorenouf 6y ago
It seems to me that the value of advice is not to get people to change their behavior right now, but rather to plant a seed in their mind that will make it easier for them to grow in the future. For example, before founding my startup, I read countless articles about the value of iterating fast. Yet I made the mistake! It seemed almost unavoidable. However, because I had read that advice so many times and actually agreed with it, it made it way easier to correct course. As soon as I realized that I was making the mistake, I integrated all this previous advice very quickly. Good advice does help, but it can only be integrated when one is ready for it.
syllogism 6y ago
Argh this bullshit is extremely frustrating. Apologies for the intemperate rant. OF COURSE nobody can use advice like "hire slow, fire fast". They ignore this advice because it's fucking useless. I just...how could someone think this was magical wisdom? Where to even start with this? How about this: consider a linear model, Y = W @ X + b. You're multiplying some weights by some input features, adding a bias vector. Advice like "hire slow, fire fast" is a bias vector at best. It's just telling you to correct in some direction. But it's the weights that matter! Of course you'll never be able to make decisions if you ignore the particulars of each situation. And notice what's not in advice like "hire slow, fire fast"? Anything about the actual situation. So of course this is useless! How do these people even function if this isn't obvious to them? Do they do this in their actual lives? Just charge around discarding all the features and making their decisions by simple rules? How do they even open their laptops to type up this crap?
- maps7 6y ago
  Harsh but I understand what you mean. I see it on Twitter all the time. People tweet nuggets of useless 'advice' and other people lap it up. Those other people also tweet in this style. Sometimes I think I am looking at bots interacting.
- _cs2017_ 6y ago
  "These people" fill in the ranks of priests, management consultants, and political activists. It matters not whether they themselves believe the bullshit they are producing; what matters is whether others believe them. They make decent money by writing books or reports, giving speeches or sermons, and in the process they influence large numbers of clueless people, among whom there are also quite a few important decision makers. So while you may be immune to their charms, you cannot simply dismiss them as irrelevant.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I dunno, I found it useful. It's a self-reminder that it's better to err on the side of caution when hiring and be more aggressive when firing. No, it's not specific advice for a specific situation. But if I'm sat pondering whether someone is a good fit for the team, it's definitely been useful to remember this.
tablet 6y ago
> And in my case, also to say “I told you so!” ;) OMG, this is so paternalizing. I can't resist but reply with "fuck you"
laybak 6y ago
From a founder's perspective, being able to take good advice first requires separating "good advice" from the "bad". I put together an ongoing collection to juxtapose the often contradictory advice here: https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/747efd5b-ab1d-492f-8dfb-d56aba761617 https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/747efd5b-ab1d-492f-8dfb...
sbt 6y ago
Have you ever tried giving parenting advice to a new mother? Giving advice to founders is the same thing. You are probably right, but this is their baby and figuring it out for themselves is part of the startup experience.
awillen 6y ago
His third answer is the right one, but he's way too dismissive of it. Founders don't listen to people because everyone said quitting your job to start a startup was dumb. Of course when those people come back and try to offer suggestions on how to run that startup that's now succeeding, they don't listen. And by the way, founders often do take good advice - they take it from other founders, VCs (the good ones, at least) and other experts who are the ones that understand entrepreneurship and/or the domian of their startup. They hire experienced VPs and take their advice, because that's why they hired them. Looking at this guy's LinkedIn, he spent ten years at Yahoo and has founded exactly nothing. Perhaps he ought to retitle the piece of "I'm upset that founders don't take my advice."
duxup 6y ago
Does any of this matter? Maybe I'm crazy but I assume that most startups fail because their product or idea wasn't great enough to take off... There's this whole world of advice surrounding the minutia of startups and I'm pretty sure generally we've found that even a half built great idea will likely take off ... and the best managed bad idea won't. Now good management advice is still good advice, although the advice here is pretty close to truisms as it gets. Yeah fire fire fast, that doesn't tell who who and why and etc. That feels very much like the "Be Radiohead" type advice.
- Jommi 6y ago
  Theres a whole host of companies with ideas that others have had / have / will have, where the difference in success comes mostly from execution rather than any specific innovation. Actualy gamechanging ideas pushing a company into success by itself is quite rare.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I see a lot of "yeah I was making that" and such stories out there, but I'm not convinced that those mean that it was 'hire slow, fire fast' that stopped them.
Jasper_ 6y ago
Why is "Hire Slow, Fire Fast" considered good advice? You can't fire faster than you hire, obviously, and firing has a tremendous cost on team morale.
jiveturkey 6y ago
> Most advice is not good. I admit that. Would have been best to stop the article there. > 3) They think they are Exception to the Rule. They are. Or rather, they need to be if they expect to succeed (by VC definition of succeed, which is the context of this article). Successful VC funded companies are by definition, exceptional. There is no playbook to follow, except T2D3 at all costs.

39 points by deppp 6y ago

If they took good advice, they wouldn’t be founders :/

I guess they don't take good advice because the advice isn't good? The author doesn't give any reasons to think otherwise.

yadco 6y ago

It could be "Why Most People Don’t Take Good Advice" The 3 reasons listed apply to a lot of people.

rudiv 6y ago

"Hire slow, fire fast" is a great example of valleyspeak that may seem horrible to someone who doesn't already know it is.

duxup 6y ago
And is super easy to say, but doing it well is an entirely different thing. And probably has nothing to do with your startup failing or succeeding.

drewcoo 6y ago

Title should be "Why Founders Don't Listen to Me." Answer is deflection: founders just aren't as smart as the author.

kristofferR 6y ago

And don't forget that founders are bombarded with what is proclaimed to be "good advice", including "Don't try, get a stable job instead" and a ton of directly conflicting advice. It quickly becomes incredibly hard to discern what is actually good advice for your situation to what is bad advice with good intentions, especially without the lived experience.

adventured 6y ago
One of the most important lessons I learned early on as an entrepreneur is the concept of well-qualified advice. When you're green, it's natural to seek advice from people you trust, people you think are smart, people with a lot of life and or business experience, family members, and so on. In most cases their advice is either going to be too general to be useful or they're going to have no knowledge and experience at what you're specifically working on, your domain, so their advice is far more likely to be dangerous. Those people will want to help, people like to be asked for advice, it feels nice; I think most people like to hear themselves talk, it's a normal thing. Their intentions will be good. I also think it's common for people to not have a good grasp of where their expertise ends and where their weakly-supported opinions begin (something everyone is guilty of at times). If you ask for an opinion, input, advice, you're likely to get it, even if the person isn't very qualified to offer it. So it's important to be very selective about who you seek advice from, making sure that they're in a position to offer valuable insight to what exactly you are dealing with.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  This, so much. I love being asked for advice, and love handing it out. It's so much easier to see the problems in someone else's business than it is in my own. Whether that's good advice or not is debatable. And as an aside, about the "right people" to get advice from: I love that concept of finding a mentor who is only just ahead of you, and therefore is solving the mistakes that you're just about to make.
  - lambdatronics 6y ago
    > finding a mentor who is only just ahead of you, and therefore is solving the mistakes that you're just about to make. This is gold! I used to buy into the idea that small colleges were a better learning environment for students due to the increased interaction with professors (class sizes ~30 vs 300). However, with younger TA's leading discussion sections, I changed my mind. I've seen professors who totally didn't understand the conceptual problem a student was having because the professor had crossed that bridge 30 years ago and forgot about it.

petargyurov 6y ago

I think the whole article can be summed up with this: > This is no different than when growing up and you used to ignore your parents advice because you think you know better To learn some things you have to experience them, often multiple times. That's why making mistakes is the most valuable part of any experience. I have made a tonne of mistakes so far, a lot of them because I was disillusioned at the time -- but disillusionment is a double-edged sword -- it can be the catalyst a lot of people need when starting a company.

timavr 6y ago

People who give a great advice can back it up by data, logical explanation, operational experience and are aware of their limitations. People who give bad advice are people who repeat the people above, but without relevant background. It is not about the audience, it is about the messenger.

doctor_eval 6y ago

Good advice is only actionable when it's also timely. "Hire slow and fire fast", for example, is not helpful advice for a founder who's still trying to get seed funding -- hiring is a problem they want to have. So the advice is good but they're not likely to remember it. You can't expect someone to squirrel away every bit of good advice, just waiting for a time when it's useful. I mean, there are plenty of times when I've slapped my head and said, "Oh, that's what they were talking about"... but mostly they told me when I didn't have the problem, and then I remembered too late :-\ Also, this pissed me off: > But due to the depth of knowledge and experience here in Silicon Valley, there are many high quality people who do give great advice I may live in Lower Fartville, but... really?

watwut 6y ago
I worked in a company that fired fast and it created a lot of insecurity. People were really wary of disagreeing with anyone remotely in more authority. They covered mistakes instead of fixing them and did everything to not look like they made a mistake. Dont hold off firing that needs to be done, but fire has did not seemed to be too good strategy.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  Yeah - to be clear I was referencing another post with that quip. Like most advice, it’s got some merit, but reality is much more complicated. Kinda the point of these posts really!

ransom1538 6y ago

Building a successful startup is %90 luck and %10 hard work. People seek advice from people that are successful. That is why receiving startup advice is so stupid. Being successful in the startup world is mainly luck with a sprinkle of grit. The analogy would be interviewing a lottery winner on how "they did it". The advice is worse than nothing at all. Here is the irony: Advice from people that fail at startups IS useful and actionable - but people don't like to listen to those people. EG. Munchery. If they had started in 2020 during covid they would be a billion dollar company. They started in 2011 and failed terribly. Luck. IF they had been successful, and did launch in 2020, the advice from this CEO would be horrible. "Hire top talent, etc" Because* the only reason they did succeed was due to timing - and that advice wouldn't be seen or given.

zpeti 6y ago
We have some real scientific insight here. I’m also sure you are a super successful entrepreneur and so definitely know it’s 90% luck.
- Talanes 6y ago
  Your trying to use their premise to insult them, but to do that you need to actually understand and keep within the premise. The error that you have made being that in the scenario presented, the successful entrepreneur does not know that luck is the main reason for their success. A better zinger would be something in the lines of suggesting that the poster only knows all this because of how acutely they have failed. Just as you have.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  We do have some scientific insight because we have several control groups, aka accelerators. If it wasn't mostly luck, accelerators would have an improved success rate, because they are selected by experienced people based on judgement calls about their likelihood of succeeding [0]. Accelerators actually have, at best, a very minor improvement on the base success rate. Therefore we can safely conclude that startup success is mostly luck. [0] Of course, this is using a definition of success that is more than just getting investment. I would define it as "becoming a sustainable business". But that would exclude things like Uber and Twitter that are not sustainable (yet), but are undeniably successful.

dagorenouf 6y ago

It seems to me that the value of advice is not to get people to change their behavior right now, but rather to plant a seed in their mind that will make it easier for them to grow in the future. For example, before founding my startup, I read countless articles about the value of iterating fast. Yet I made the mistake! It seemed almost unavoidable. However, because I had read that advice so many times and actually agreed with it, it made it way easier to correct course. As soon as I realized that I was making the mistake, I integrated all this previous advice very quickly. Good advice does help, but it can only be integrated when one is ready for it.

syllogism 6y ago

Argh this bullshit is extremely frustrating. Apologies for the intemperate rant. OF COURSE nobody can use advice like "hire slow, fire fast". They ignore this advice because it's fucking useless. I just...how could someone think this was magical wisdom? Where to even start with this? How about this: consider a linear model, Y = W @ X + b. You're multiplying some weights by some input features, adding a bias vector. Advice like "hire slow, fire fast" is a bias vector at best. It's just telling you to correct in some direction. But it's the weights that matter! Of course you'll never be able to make decisions if you ignore the particulars of each situation. And notice what's not in advice like "hire slow, fire fast"? Anything about the actual situation. So of course this is useless! How do these people even function if this isn't obvious to them? Do they do this in their actual lives? Just charge around discarding all the features and making their decisions by simple rules? How do they even open their laptops to type up this crap?

maps7 6y ago
Harsh but I understand what you mean. I see it on Twitter all the time. People tweet nuggets of useless 'advice' and other people lap it up. Those other people also tweet in this style. Sometimes I think I am looking at bots interacting.
_cs2017_ 6y ago
"These people" fill in the ranks of priests, management consultants, and political activists. It matters not whether they themselves believe the bullshit they are producing; what matters is whether others believe them. They make decent money by writing books or reports, giving speeches or sermons, and in the process they influence large numbers of clueless people, among whom there are also quite a few important decision makers. So while you may be immune to their charms, you cannot simply dismiss them as irrelevant.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I dunno, I found it useful. It's a self-reminder that it's better to err on the side of caution when hiring and be more aggressive when firing. No, it's not specific advice for a specific situation. But if I'm sat pondering whether someone is a good fit for the team, it's definitely been useful to remember this.

tablet 6y ago

> And in my case, also to say “I told you so!” ;) OMG, this is so paternalizing. I can't resist but reply with "fuck you"

laybak 6y ago

From a founder's perspective, being able to take good advice first requires separating "good advice" from the "bad". I put together an ongoing collection to juxtapose the often contradictory advice here: https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/747efd5b-ab1d-492f-8dfb-d56aba761617 https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/747efd5b-ab1d-492f-8dfb...

sbt 6y ago

Have you ever tried giving parenting advice to a new mother? Giving advice to founders is the same thing. You are probably right, but this is their baby and figuring it out for themselves is part of the startup experience.

awillen 6y ago

His third answer is the right one, but he's way too dismissive of it. Founders don't listen to people because everyone said quitting your job to start a startup was dumb. Of course when those people come back and try to offer suggestions on how to run that startup that's now succeeding, they don't listen. And by the way, founders often do take good advice - they take it from other founders, VCs (the good ones, at least) and other experts who are the ones that understand entrepreneurship and/or the domian of their startup. They hire experienced VPs and take their advice, because that's why they hired them. Looking at this guy's LinkedIn, he spent ten years at Yahoo and has founded exactly nothing. Perhaps he ought to retitle the piece of "I'm upset that founders don't take my advice."

duxup 6y ago

Does any of this matter? Maybe I'm crazy but I assume that most startups fail because their product or idea wasn't great enough to take off... There's this whole world of advice surrounding the minutia of startups and I'm pretty sure generally we've found that even a half built great idea will likely take off ... and the best managed bad idea won't. Now good management advice is still good advice, although the advice here is pretty close to truisms as it gets. Yeah fire fire fast, that doesn't tell who who and why and etc. That feels very much like the "Be Radiohead" type advice.

Jommi 6y ago
Theres a whole host of companies with ideas that others have had / have / will have, where the difference in success comes mostly from execution rather than any specific innovation. Actualy gamechanging ideas pushing a company into success by itself is quite rare.
- duxup 6y ago
  I see a lot of "yeah I was making that" and such stories out there, but I'm not convinced that those mean that it was 'hire slow, fire fast' that stopped them.

Jasper_ 6y ago

Why is "Hire Slow, Fire Fast" considered good advice? You can't fire faster than you hire, obviously, and firing has a tremendous cost on team morale.

jiveturkey 6y ago

> Most advice is not good. I admit that. Would have been best to stop the article there. > 3) They think they are Exception to the Rule. They are. Or rather, they need to be if they expect to succeed (by VC definition of succeed, which is the context of this article). Successful VC funded companies are by definition, exceptional. There is no playbook to follow, except T2D3 at all costs.