The Problem With Startup "Experts"

There’s a lot of advice giving things that are attached to a large tech company or like a European conglomerate, and they’re like, “This is our Innovation lab and we are going to work with startups. Yes, and like we’ll be your first customer, we’ll be your first customer, we will teach you Innovation.”

All right, this is Dalton plus Michael, and today we’re going to help you answer a question: Are you getting the best startup advice? So we encounter a lot of Founders, and their Founders spread all over the world, and there are advice givers spread all over the world. How would you advise a Founder to think about where they should be sourcing their advice from?

I think to start with, it’s much harder for me as a Y Combinator partner to try to debug something where someone has gone really far with questionable advice and dug in a deep hole than someone that’s completely fresh, a blank slate. And actually, counterintuitively, someone that knows very little of startup advice or knows very little, yes of anything—they’ve just been like, “Oh yeah, I’ve just been building this thing that I wanted,” or, “Yeah, I’ve just been in school.”

They’ve just kept their head down, and so they haven’t even had the chance to develop bad habits or strange ideas about how to do a startup. So for instance, the strange idea: “Oh, the first thing I should do is get a bunch of advisers and create a board of advisors,” and that’s essential—it would never even occur to someone right after my PowerPoint, that would never occur to a lot of people, yes.

But we just noticed there are folks who, you know, have a bunch of unusual ideas from my perspective. When we try to debug why, what do we learn, Michael? What’s the root cause? Yeah, someone somewhere was giving them a bunch of advice that was wrong. They used that advice to create a mental model of the startup world that was wrong. And to your point, teaching a Founder to unlearn their mental model of the startup world, that’s a project—it’s harder. That’s harder.

It’s harder than a blank slate, which is— I don’t know anything. Well, it’s funny is I—you know, I can’t speak to you, but when I think back to my first days of startup, like I didn’t—I didn’t know anything. I didn’t either. It’s like I didn’t. Ignorance was a feature in so many ways, but man, yeah, like if my head was filled with bad business advice, I think that would have been horrible.

Here’s the trick, though, man: like I’m trying to run my company well—shouldn’t I be trying to find advice, right? Like aren’t there best practices? Shouldn’t I learn them? I think the metaphor that I would use is that most people want to be in the big league, so to speak; they want to be at the highest level of their industry.

If you want to be doing a venture-funded startup, at least course. If I were to give advice to one of my children that wanted to be an actor or wanted to be a musician or something like that, I would probably say, “Go to the places where the top percent of people that actually are working in the industry are, and try to meet and find those people and break into it.”

As opposed to stay in some small town somewhere with there likely being local experts? It seems obvious when I say that metaphor. If you want to be an actor, you should do that. Or if you want—whoa, whoa, whoa, but like I know people in Boise, Idaho—it’s where I grew up. Isn’t that where, isn’t that where I’m going to have an advantage? You know, those people will talk to me. Yeah, when I go to L.A., no one talks to me.

And you know there’s a lot of on-campus resources, there’s a lot of resources in various places. And the key thing to understand about a lot of places is their incentives may not be aligned with yours. Yeah, a lot of startup ecosystems exist to create jobs in the local economy, to stimulate the local economy for a variety of reasons.

Again, it’s all cool stuff, but it’s hard to imagine any of those places giving you advice that involves leaving those places because that is antithetical to their mission. Yeah, and so a lot of the advice is stay here, don’t get too big, etc., etc., etc. I mean you can speak—I mean we experienced this.

It was funny; I experienced this at Yale, but I wasn’t working on a startup so it didn’t really take. But like there was this vibe of like, “New Haven’s an innovation hub. There’s some area of campus where there’s offices where people are creating companies, and you can do that. This is your fertile ground.” And man, it’s such a weird—in hindsight, it was like that’s not fertile ground.

Like that’s not where big companies are coming from. But to your point, like can you blame Yale for trying to invigorate the New Haven economy? Like, who are you going to hire to work on those things? What’s crazy is I meet a lot of Founders who have talked to a lot of people to get started advice, and it’s people that worked at big companies, yeah, and who’ve never worked at a startup or people that studied the Lean Startup manual.

Yeah, and so again, like it’s coming from a good place, but it’d be the equivalent of getting acting advice from someone who’s not worked as an actor or ever helped anyone who’s worked as an actor. Like it’s tricky, right? Yeah, and so I think this is like one of the things that we’ve learned a lot is that I understand why people go to these folks because like doing a startup’s hard.

And as nice as it is to watch a YouTube video, right, you can’t talk to us. As nice as it is to read blog posts or to read PG’s essays, you can’t talk to them. And like, you know, one of the things you talk about a lot is that some part of talking to an adviser is about advice and like working through tactics, but a big part is just—this sucks.

Like can we just talk about how bad this sucks for a second? Can I get a little bit of therapy? You know, like yeah, and you can’t get therapy with the YouTube video. The problem with trying to get advice out of people who would be perfectly good to give you therapy, right, is man, like they might not be giving you good advice.

Yep, it’s tricky. Oftentimes I tell Founders it’s like you should have people in your life— a significant other, friend, family member—who like you can go to and shit’s down, but you’re not going to get startup advice from them. You’re going to get the “when things are hard, you should still stick with them” like life advice from them.

I also wonder sometimes, like if this was 20 years ago, you couldn’t really consume content from these people, but like nowadays, yeah, this is what’s interesting. I think you can get a lot from these online resources. And that might be, if you had to choose between not great advice locally and online, I think I would take online.

It’s funny ‘cause it’s like let’s do like the rank order, right? Like we can debate what I’d prefer: zero startup advice consumption or top 1% online. Yeah, like those are both better than like local bad advice. Yeah, you know it’s interesting—this pattern of like no advice is better than bad advice, like it actually applies in other parts of the world, right?

So there are other products that you’d probably rather not consume if you can’t get the best ones. Right? It’s like, “Well, Dalton, I have these eggs here—they’ve been in my refrigerator for about 3 weeks—like you want it?” Maybe. Maybe it’s like—“Let’s have oatmeal.” Worse—worse than nothing. It’s worse than nothing.

Yes, what are other—what are other examples of worse than nothing? I guess one that I notice—watching television, reality television sometimes is bad plastic surgery, and I think one way to say it is bad plastic surgery from someone that is not great is definitely worse than not having it at all.

Yes, that’s a worse—a great example: tattoos. “I have the 100th best tattoo artist.” You don’t have the 100—you’ve got the 100,000th, you know, you’re kind of stuck with that tattoo. Is a perfect example. “Oh, this is the first time they’ve ever done a tattoo.” Yeah, but someone’s got to be their first, right?

It’s like, “This is the first time I’ve ever talked to a potentially successful startup Founder.” Anything that’s permanent and where there’s wide variability on the quality of service you can get, and it’s your life. Like you only get to do it once, maybe twice in your life. You know, be—you want to be picky about stuff like that.

You want to be picky? Be picky about your startup advice. There you go. I think the other thing that unfortunately happens when you get this kind of local bad advice is that sometimes the process of like undoing it is so—it’s like such a downer.

Like it’s such—you down, or when someone like makes you believe this is going to happen fast or like this is a big opportunity or like this is some rule, and then you learn it’s not, and then you’re like, “Oh, like this is going to be—this is hard.”

This is going to be hard. Well, again, to give a concrete example, there’s a lot of advice giving things that are attached to a large tech company or like a European conglomerate, and they’re like, “This is our Innovation lab, and we are going to work with startups.”

Yes, and like we’ll be your first customer, we’ll be your first customer, teach you innovation. No, it sounds so good; it sounds so good. There’s a lot of these, and they don’t work because like the motivation, like you said, motivation is unaligned.

Yeah, if I’m some big car company with an innovation lab, my motivation is not to invest in the car company that disrupts me. Negative, but we can make so much money! It’s like we like our business; it’s like to get a promotion so the VP of innovation can hit their like quarterly KPIs.

Like you’re like a product, literally. You know, you’re like, “Okay, how many startups did we help?” You know, “Great, look at how much Innovation we’ve created!” What’s interesting is that one of the reasons why we tell people to come here is just man, like the density.

Yeah, there’s some people giving bad advice in the Bay Area, but like the density of people who’ve done it before, right? It’s like people who’ve invested in good companies, started good companies, or advised good companies is there. Is there a more dense place on Earth?

Yeah, I don’t know. So it’s like, “Hey, any little thing you can do to make the odds better—consuming advice from people who’ve done it before, that’s—that’s one.” And also I think you honestly get more optimistic advice.

That’s like just—yes. Basically, a lot of what I would call Bay Area perspective is just “talk to customers,” “just make something great,” “build a great product.” Yeah, and a lot of what filtered through local advice is “get a board of advisers,” “partner with big companies,” “strategy and patents,” “get a patent strategy.”

You’ve basically—it's all involved on trying to network with the right people, and the product is like an afterthought. It’s so sad too because, you know, one of the funny things I think about with Bay Area advice and investors, it’s like they’ve seen it work.

Yes, that makes you more optimistic; it makes you way more optimistic. It’s like, “You know, I thought this thing wasn’t going to work, and then it worked and now—how good is my ability to tell?” Whereas like I often joke, you know, like the startup accelerator in my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey—every time they’ve said no to a startup investment, I bet they were right.

Yeah, I bet they’ve got no misses. So yeah, so consume good advice, and hey, maybe it’s not us, right? Like you could say—there are many options, right? But I think we’re probably better than the—you know, and look for stuff that inspires you, and that involves talking to customers and building things as opposed to, “Well, the strategy is some sort of complicated business-corporate whatever.”

Yeah, that’s probably not going to inspire you and cause you to build great things. All right, man. Good chat. Thanks.