Does general startup advice apply broadly across founders, or only to the specific context it originated from?

Mo Koyfman · Aug 8, 2022 · hedged

Having multiple mentors who give flatly contradictory advice is valuable rather than confusing

The contradiction itself is interesting and forces him to reckon with competing views

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Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

Founder advice is inherently contradictory — for any entrepreneur telling you to go through the wall there's another telling you to go around it — because there are always multiple ways to succeed

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Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

There is no single right way to build a company; you need a philosophy that accommodates the contradictory successful examples and then apply it to your own secrets and differentiation

Nothing that works at Apple would work at Google and Google does the antithesis of Apple, yet both succeed — because each is built on secrets about the world others don't believe

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Davis Smith · Dec 15, 2023

There is no single right way to build a business — raising venture capital is entirely legitimate, but it brings external pressures that a bootstrapped, owner-operated business does not have

He has lived both: the bootstrapped pool table business he owns outright versus the venture-backed business that grew very fast under all sorts of external pressures

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David Tisch · Feb 27, 2023

Generic investor advice is harmful because founders read it and assume it applies to them; early-stage investors' job is to give customized, nuanced, tactical advice specific to each company

Every company is very different and its specific variables drive how it should be built

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Jean-Denis Greze · Jul 21, 2023

Startup advice is only useful insofar as its fact pattern matches your situation, and since it usually doesn't, the value lies in the delta between the advice and where you actually are

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Akshay Kothari · Sep 18, 2024

Almost all startup advice is genius for a subset of people and completely useless for everyone else

Advice only works in situations that match the one it came from, so its value depends entirely on who is receiving it

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David Tisch · Feb 27, 2023

Founders take on real risk when they believe and act on generic advice content that isn't specific to their situation

Advice decoupled from your specific context shouldn't be treated as truth; media — podcasts, blogs, Twitter, TikTok — is like a newspaper and you shouldn't believe everything you read in it

39:40 Acting on generic media advice without verifying fit is genuinely risky for founders