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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

#31

Post by spiffytech »

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…

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#32

Post by jfengel »

xtiansimon wrote: post #30
starfallg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speec…

They say that markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The same goes for the marketplace of ideas. There may be some long-term punishment for people who accept bad ideas and reason badly with them, but many people get along just fine for a very long time.

The canonical case for me is creationists, who apply some of the most trivially bad reasoning I can conceive, yet it doesn't actually mess up their daily lives. It even benefits them, since it reinforces membership in their tribe. Sure, it cuts them off from certain careers -- more than they realize -- but most people don't directly apply evolution all that often. (Indeed, many who do, like armchair evolutionary psychologists, usually do it wrong.)

People can often compartmentalize their bad reasoning in ways that the negative effects are distant enough that they get along just fine. It may bite them long term, but in the long term we're all dead anyway. The time frame in which "good ideas win in the end" may be several human lifetimes.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#33

Post by rightbyte »

jfengel wrote: post #32
xtiansimon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 speec…

They say that markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The same goes for the marketplace of ideas. There may be some long-term punishment for people who accept bad ideas and reason badly with them, but many people get along just fine for a very long time. The canonical case for me is creationists, who apply some of the most trivially bad reasoning I can conceive, yet it doesn't actually mess…

Except some fields of biology what fields are creationists actually not welcome in in practice? I mean some religions cuts you out of cow meat and pig farms. Creationists surely are far less limited in practice.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#34

Post by awillen »

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."

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#35

Post by starfallg »

xtiansimon wrote: post #30
starfallg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speec…

>Evaluation must be separate from dissemination.

Evaluation is inevitably linked to dissemination. We cannot evaluate what we have not received, yet we are now receiving too much to effectively evaluate.

And then there is the matter of bias - once an idea has been repeated enough times it takes hold, regardless of rationality.

>the dissemination of deliberate misinformation and lies, and the difficulty and _high cost_ of navigating this ecosystem.

Isn't this distinction arbitrary? To an observer, the intention of the messenger is opaque. Deliberate lies and innocent misinformation arrives together for us to evaluate. Dealing with it at the source introduces a variety of problems in our current model, and judging intent with regards to speech is problematic.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#36

Post by xtiansimon »

jfengel wrote: post #32
xtiansimon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 speec…

They say that markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The same goes for the marketplace of ideas. There may be some long-term punishment for people who accept bad ideas and reason badly with them, but many people get along just fine for a very long time. The canonical case for me is creationists, who apply some of the most trivially bad reasoning I can conceive, yet it doesn't actually mess…

> "reinforces membership in their tribe"

This was mentioned in ComicCon@HOME video panel: "Watchmen and the Cruelty of Masks" which I watched last night [1][2]

And it's been mentioned by Richard Dawkins in the context of "flat-Earthers" [3], and, of course, religion itself.

Right now I'm thinking a lot about memetics as having explanatory power for the long-term effects you describe.

[1]: https://www.comic-con.org/cciathome/2020/wednesday [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5R-9kcV0WY&feature=youtu.be [3]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/richard-dawkins-flat-ea...

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#37

Post by duxup »

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#38

Post by duxup »

rudiv wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#40

Post by Jommi »

duxup wrote: post #37

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…

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.

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