
Why Most Founders Don’t Take Good Advice - deppp
https://hardfork.substack.com/p/why-most-founders-dont-take-good
======
syllogism
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?

~~~
roenxi
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.

~~~
starfallg
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.

~~~
xtiansimon
> "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?)

~~~
jfengel
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.

~~~
rightbyte
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.

------
doctor_eval
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
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_eval
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!

------
kristofferR
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
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_holmes
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.

~~~
lambdatronics
> 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.

------
petargyurov
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.

------
dagorenouf
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.

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

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

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

~~~
duxup
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.

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

------
timavr
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.

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

------
Jasper_
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.

------
laybak
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...](https://knowledgeartist.org/articles/747efd5b-ab1d-492f-8dfb-d56aba761617)

------
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."

------
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.

~~~
Jommi
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.

~~~
duxup
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.

------
jiveturkey
> 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.

------
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.

------
ransom1538
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
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.

~~~
marcus_holmes
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.

