The Problem With Startup "Experts"

Alright. 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 YC partner to try to debug something where someone has gone really far with questionable advice and dug themselves in a deep hole Yeah. Than someone that's completely fresh blank slate and actually counterintuitively someone that knows very little of startup advice or knows very little of anything. They've just been like, oh, yeah.

I've just been Building this thing that I wanted. Yeah. I've just been in school. I've been Yes. They just kept their head down. Yes. And so they don't even they haven't had the chance to develop bad habits or strange ideas about how to Yes. To do a startup.

So for instance, the strange idea, oh, the first thing I should do is get a bunch of advisors and create a board of advisors and That's essential. It it would never even occur to someone Right after my PowerPoint deck. 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.

And if when we try to debug why, what do we learn, Michael? What's the root cause? Yes. 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 fucking project. It's harder. That's harder. It's it's harder than a blank slate, which is I don't know anything.

Well, and it's funny is I I, you know, I can't speak to you, when I think back to my first days of startup, like I didn't I didn't know anything. I didn't mean anything.

It's like I did. Ignorance was a feature in so many ways. But 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. My 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 wanna be in the big league.

Okay. So to speak. They wanna be at the highest level of their industry if you wanna be doing a venture funded startup at least. Of course. If I were to give advice to 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 Yeah. Are Yeah.

And try to meet and find those people and break into it as opposed to stay in some small town somewhere where there likely is local experts.

It seems obvious when I say that metaphor, if you want to be an actor, you should do that or Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. But like, I know people in Boise, Idaho. It's where I grew up. Isn't that where isn't that where I'm gonna have an advantage? You know?

Those people will talk to me. Yeah. When I go to LA, no one talks to And.

it's, you know, there's a lot of on campus resources. There's a lot of resources in various places. And 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 or 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, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, you you you can speak I mean, experienced this. It was funny. I experienced this at Yale, but I wasn't working at 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 and you can like this this is your fertile ground. And man, it's such a weird in hindsight, it was like, that's not fertile Yeah. Ground. Like, that's not where big companies are coming from. But to your point, like, can you blame Yale for trying to Yeah. Makes sense.

Invigorate the New Haven economy?

Who are you gonna hire to work on those things? What's crazy is you I meet a lot of founders Yeah. Who have talked to a lot of people to get start advice. It's people that worked at big companies and who have never worked at a start up or people that Studied the lean start up manual. Yeah. And so again, 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.

Never 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 to read blog p marker or to read PG's essays, you can't talk to them. And, like, you know, one of the things we 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 because oftentimes I tell founders, it's like, you should have people in your life, a significant other, a friend, a family member who, like, you can go to when shit's down. You're not gonna get startup advice from them. You're gonna get the, like, when things are hard, you should still stick with them, like, life advice from them. Yep.

I also wonder sometimes, like, if this was twenty years ago, you couldn't really consume content from these people. But like nowadays.

Yeah. Well, this is what's interesting is I think you can get a lot from these online resources. Yeah. 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 because it's like let's do like the rank order. Right? Like, I.

we can debate whether I prefer zero startup advice consumption or top 1% online. Yeah. Like, those are, like, debating. 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 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 three weeks. Like, you wanna? It's like,.

maybe maybe it's like, what's that oatmeal? It's worse than worse than nothing. It's worse than nothing. Yeah. Yes. What are other what are other examples of than nothing? I guess one that I notice watching television, reality television sometimes is plastic surgery. Oh yeah.

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 worse. Great example. Tattoos.

I have the hundredth best tattoo artist. You don't have the hundredth. You've got the hundredth thousandth.

You know, You're kinda stuck with that. Tattoo is a perfect example. Oh, this is the first time they've ever done a tattoo. Yeah. But ever someone's gotta be there 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, you'd be You wanna be picky about stuff like that. You wanna 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 a downer when someone, like, makes you believe this is gonna happen fast or, like, this is a big opportunity. You're, like, this is some rule, and then you learn it's not. And then you're like, oh, shit. Like, this is gonna be this is this hard? This is gonna be 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 they We'll be your first customer. We'll be your first customer. We will teach you innovation. No. And 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's unaligned. Yeah. But 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 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, where it's like people who've invested in good companies, started good companies, or advised good companies. Is there a more dense place on earth? Yeah.

I don't 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 it's 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. Yeah. Just make something great. Build a great product. Yeah.

And a lot of what filtered through local advice is get a board of advisors, partner with big companies Strategy and patents. Get a patent strategy. Oh my god. You bay basically, it's all involved on trying to.

network with the right people. Yeah. 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 is that, like, they've seen it work. Yes. It makes you way more optim it's like, you know, I thought this thing wasn't gonna work, and then it worked. And now I'm like,.

how good is my ability to tell? Whereas,.

like, I often joke, you know, like, the 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 I so yeah. So consume good advice. And, hey, maybe it's not us. Right? Like, could say not there are many options.

Right? Yeah. But I think we're probably better than the, you know, eSports. And look for stuff that inspires you and then 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. Alright,.

man. Good chat. Thanks.