The existence of counterexamples and conflicting advice doesn't mean that advice isn't useful, conflicting advice is just a symptom of startups being uncertain. With a large enough sample size of advice, you can start to make sense of it, understand what's good and bad advice, understand how people's life experience and incentives may color their advice etc. this makes it much easier for you to turn that advice into decisions and actionable steps
If you think about it this way then more advice is better. It's just up to you to synthesize that advice and decide what to do with it
I guess what I’m saying is embrace ambiguity in the advice more clearly. Don’t say “Do X” and “Do the opposite of X”, which together give you no ground to “synthesize”.
Another approach is to describe the effect of “Doing X”. Maybe building fast means you can get to market faster. Maybe building something nontrivial means your competition won’t gobble up your market. But you, the founder, are the arbiter of that decision/tradeoff.
ISTM that many startup-advice-givers like to create these short memorable platitudes instead of actually describing tradeoffs and decisions that the founder must make.
Because there's no set of instructions that will work for sure.
What one needs to success with a startup is several of these: work hard, work smart, connections, piles of money, idea, marketing, good timing and luck.
You can have most of them and not triumf, you can have only a pair and succeed. With none it's not possible. The ones that seem to matter the most are the ones you come with (money/connections) and the ones that you can't affect much (good timing/luck).
I’m not sure marketing belongs in the list though. It’s critical but it’s a part of execution and overlaps with several other items on the list. Just stood out to me.
I’d also challenge the last paragraph. I don’t think anything on this list matters as much as working hard. Literally every single successful business owner I’ve ever known has worked their ass off, usually for many years. For me the correlation is 100%. That’s not to say it’s sufficient but it seems necessary and the most equalizing force on your list [1]
1. Although I sometimes think in our fetishization of hard work, we ignore the fact that not everyone can grind away for years on a speculative venture even if they wanted to. I know many wonderful people who just don’t have that personality. Telling them to “outwork their competition” makes as much sense as telling someone to change their favorite color or decide to love a food they hate. It’s just not how they’re wired and that’s OK.
There are plenty of people working as hard as they can, that doesn't mean their starup will work out. They might be working on the wrong problem, they might have bad sales/virality, they might be doing a great product but too soon/late for the market, someone bigger might be fighting for the same market, they might just be unlucky.
Without the hard work there is no startup, for sure. But fetishizing it leads to the whole "you were not working enough/you didn't want it enough" toxic concept of people only getting what they deserve. Life is not fair, good people have bad things happen to them from time to time, bad people sometimes have good things happen to them, hard working people don't always succeed.
[edit - disclosure: I was one of the presenters in this series.]
What’s the point of having access to a ton of great advisors if they’re constantly all telling you conflicting things? Is the answer just to go with your gut? If so, why do you need the advisors? Is it more to prime your decision making with possibilities? Or is it more for tactical execution advice once you decide on a direction? Or something else?
Here’s my conflicting bit of advice. ;)
The point is to get the best head start you can, and to get it by knowing many ways other people succeeded. They will share some common themes on how to succeed, and maybe more importantly, common themes on how to accidentally fail.
You’ll always get conflicting advice no matter what the context is. The same thing happened to me before and after getting my startup funded- advice was all over the map. And it has also happened in academics and at jobs and among my friends and family. Ask 5 people anything, you’ll get 5 answers. People simply have different points of view, and there are usually multiple right answers.
It’s a feature because it’s important to understand that there isn’t a right answer but a continuum of possibilities that you get to influence. It’s important to understand how people construct and use narratives about their successes. It’s important to see clearly that there’s some luck involved, even if nobody admits it.
Customers, by the way, will give even more wildly conflicting information, so being able to sift through conflicting information is a good skill to have.
Going with your gut will only work if your gut knows how to make good business decisions, which a few people have but not everyone. Software engineers, for example, have guts that tell them that writing awesome software is the one thing that will do the trick, the product will sell itself. Advisors will all tell them that marketing is more important, but they will all disagree on how & where to do the marketing.
There are other side benefits to advisors, including: having influential people rooting for you publicly, having help meeting new investors, getting tactical advice on business and management problems, having a support group of people who’ve gone through some of tough things you’re going through because friends and family don’t understand. I think there’s more but you get where I’m going...
It's how investors do technical diligence, it's how executives of large companies make decisions, it's a part of the peer review process in science.
Advisors don't exist to tell you how to do your job. If that was the case they'd be your boss, not your advisor. They are there to help you see the full picture, and assess different perspectives, and challenge your thinking. But ultimately you make the call
This is a quote from Tren Griffin about the stock market but it holds true for startups as well. Successful people who help out entrepreneurs often take their survivorship bias'd situations and assign single factor causation to them. Thus you end up with conflicting advice because "sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't".
Generic advice is not hurtful, it's just not contextual. It's your job (the founder) to decide whether it can fit your context or not.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there's not good advice floating around. There is. The trick is knowing how to separate the bad from the good, and as someone who's new to the startup world, that's pretty hard (impossible?) to do.
Some people smoke cigarettes their whole life and live until old age without ever getting cancer. Should we conclude smoking does not cause cancer just because there are counter examples?
As you said, the advice is meant to maximize the chance of success. It is still not sufficient or without exceptions.
In the end, advice is only valuable if you put it through your own filter and use your own judgement to make the best decision.
- Peter Thiel
Youtube was a hard pivot from a video dating site.
Furthermore, they are extremely biased towards start-ups, which is understandable. You could not easily make a worse financial decision, statistically speaking. But they need most of us to do it for them to stay in business.
My point is that a lot of the advice I’ve heard about startups in general is framed (intentionally or unintentionally) as a series of directives that will optimize your chances of success. Moreover, no other additional context is provided to help you frame the advice, such that you can tell whether or not it’s applicable or appropriate advice to follow. The lack of context coupled with the existence of so many blatant counterexamples and contradictions prevents the advice from being useful.
(Note: I edited the last paragraph for clarity)