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

David Tisch · published 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

33:35 20VC: How Multi-Stage Funds Changed The Game For Seed Rounds, Why Signalling Risk is BS, The Three Most Important Variables for Founders When Raising Rounds & A Debate on Portfolio Construction: Does Ownership Matter with David Tisch

Jean-Denis Greze · published 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

45:27 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai

Keith Rabois · published Nov 27, 2023

Every successful company is like a cult and every cult that works is unique, so applying generic advice to a specific company can be actively harmful

Generic frameworks ignore a company's specific talent pool, market and culture; the founder's job is to identify what's differentiated and adapt general frameworks to it

40:48 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

Shopify is repeatedly good at doing things that would be a bad idea for almost any other company but are exceptionally good for Shopify

Its core bets — remote work, serving ecommerce, serving high-churn small businesses — were all considered bad ideas by outsiders yet worked for Shopify

27:50 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Akshay Kothari · published 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

40:21 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari

Mo Koyfman · published 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

11:22 20VC: Investing Lessons from Fred Wilson and Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds | Why the Secret to Winning in Venture is Splitting Deals |Learnings From the Biggest Hits and Biggest Losses | Why Anyone That Always Does Their Pro-Rata is Wrong with Mo

Miki Kuusi · published 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

40:39 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin

Davis Smith · published 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

20:52 20VC: Cotopaxi: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling $150M in Revenues and Challenging Patagonia, Fundraising Lessons from 100+ Rejections & What Founders Do Not Understand About VC with Davis Smith, Founder @ Cotopaxi

David Tisch · published 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

Paul Graham · published Sep 2022

Most startups have essentially the same problems regardless of what they're making, so after advising about 100 startups you rarely see a problem you haven't seen before.

Observed recurrence of the same problems in different forms across hundreds of companies doing different things.

source Startup problems recur in similar patterns across companies enabling pattern based advice