Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

https://hardfork.substack.com/p/why-most-founders-dont-take-good

by deppp • 6 years ago

39 44 6 years ago

hardfork.substack.com

Aeolun• 6 years ago

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

fogetti• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

rudiv• 6 years ago

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

duxup3• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Title should be "Why Founders Don't Listen to Me."

Answer is deflection: founders just aren't as smart as the author.

kristofferR• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_holmes3• 6 years 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.

laybak3• 6 years ago

Very much agreed! I feel this dwarfs the reasons listed in the original post (maybe with the exception of #1).

For every piece of advice available, I can find you an equally credible person saying the opposite.

lambdatronics2• 6 years ago

“The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” – Niels Bohr

petargyurov• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_eval2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_eval2• 6 years 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!

ransom15382• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_holmes3• 6 years 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.

spiffytech• 6 years ago

The fallacy here is assuming a startup's luck stat is constant. But there's this notion of a "luck surface area", that you can deliberately increase your chances of getting lucky by e.g., hiring people who have a track record of success in a broad range of circumstances instead of narrow, or by networking with diverse, successful industry leaders instead of scrappy unproven founders with no resources.

Seeking advice from successful founders can be useful because some of what they did likely increased their odds of getting lucky, and following their advice could boost your own luck stat, which is useful even if the particular stroke of luck your startup needs is totally different from your advisor's.

ransom15382• 6 years ago

"Seeking advice from successful founders can be useful because some of what they did likely increased their odds of getting lucky,"

Apparently not. Look at a great incubator. They invest in new ideas all day. It's basically gambling.

dagorenouf• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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_• 6 years 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_holmes3• 6 years 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.

roenxi• 6 years ago

If you look at society as a system it should be clear that spreading ideas is critical and difficult. Consider basic and topical advice like "wash your hands". Even for that simple advice the number of people who can talk to why we wash our hands is small compared to the number of people who need to be washing their hands (consider eg, how soap interacts with bacteria - very few people understand that, or how bacteria on hands enter the body via various means which another large group of people don't understand). For more complicated ideas, the numbers get terrible very quickly.

It is important to have mechanisms where good ideas are spread - and indeed encouraged socially - that do not require people who understand why the idea is good.

What you are seeing is the people who have (probably not on purpose) fallen into the role of pushing ideas they don't understand around in the hope that they are helping. Since it makes evolutionary sense, there are probably some % of people who just get a real kick out of finding out what someone smart thinks then repeating it ad-nauseam. If you are unusual enough to be an independent thinker it can be a bit baffling - but such people are useful and indeed vital. It would be nice to have a less noisy channel though.

starfallg2• 6 years ago

This is also one of the problems with people believing in the inherent superiority of free speech.

People take free speech as always benefiting society, where good ideas are destined to win out in the end, when the reality is that it depends on if the system encourages good ideas to spread while inhibiting the bad ones. A system that rewards people disseminating bad ideas would result in a weak society.

laybak3• 6 years 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...

sbt• 6 years 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• 6 years 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."

duxup3• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

duxup3• 6 years 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_• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

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