Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#41

Post by lambdatronics » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

laybak wrote: post #27

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.

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

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#42

Post by duxup » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #40

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.

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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#43

Post by jiveturkey » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#44

Post by lambdatronics » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #26

adventured wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#45

Post by laybak » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

lambdatronics wrote: post #41

laybak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Nice, great quote! :D

Re: Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice

#46

Post by ransom1538 » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

spiffytech wrote: post #31

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…

"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.