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Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

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Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#21

Post by marcus_holmes »

syllogism wrote: post #17

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.…

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#22

Post by Talanes »

zpeti wrote: post #13
ransom1538 wrote: post #12

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 u…

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.

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#23

Post by roenxi »

syllogism wrote: post #17

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.…

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#24

Post by marcus_holmes »

zpeti wrote: post #13
ransom1538 wrote: post #12

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 u…

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.

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#26

Post by marcus_holmes »

adventured wrote: post #14
kristofferR wrote: post #7

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.

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 a…

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#27

Post by laybak »

kristofferR wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#28

Post by starfallg »

roenxi wrote: post #23
syllogism wrote: post #17

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.…

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 bacteri…

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#29

Post by sbt »

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#30

Post by xtiansimon »

starfallg wrote: post #28
roenxi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bacteri…

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.

> "inherent superiority of free speech"

I'm not going to attempt to unpack "inherent superiority", but on the surface this seems like a terrible false belief or conclusion. Free speech has social difficulties. It sucks when we hear ideas we disagree with distributed widely through media. Amazingly, the dissemination of bad ideas is not one of it's problems.

> "good ideas are destined to win out in the end"

Free speech permits individuals to make _informed decisions_. Good information. Bad information. Evaluation must be separate from dissemination.

This is the Millennial parent's crisis. How to teach children growing up in the age of the internet (free speech), to make good decisions (evaluation) when they can find literally anything online (good, bad, lies, etc.).

I apologize if I'm being too strong in my reaction to what might just be an off the cuff _idea_. Any other time I would ignore the comment, but its being conflated here with a very real problem of our time--the dissemination of deliberate misinformation and lies, and the difficulty and _high cost_ of navigating this ecosystem.

The latter is an issue of pollution.

(BTW, do you know the itemized costs of your water service to your home is typically 3:1 or 4:1 sewage:fresh?)

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