Should founders defer to investor/board strategic advice, or trust and assert their own conviction?

Harry Stebbings · published May 12, 2023

A really big problem in startups is entrepreneurs building companies for investors or in the way they think investors want to see it

38:43 20VC: Why The Future of AI Is Open Not Closed, Why We Are Years Away From AI Being Autonomous, Why AI Founders Do Not Need to Move to the Valley & Why Founders Should Not Meet Investors in Between Rounds with Clem Delangue @ Hugging Face

Marcelo Claure · published Jul 31, 2023

Founders should trust their own gut, because a great founder's instinct is right roughly 90% of the time

When you review a founder's last ten decisions and separate the ones that were their own from the ones taken on the advice of the last person who spoke to them, their own calls are almost always the right ones

Scope: listen to others as a check on your gut, not as a substitute

13:43 20VC: Marcelo Claure & Shu Nyatta on Lessons from Investing $7.5BN at Softbank & Why Dumb Money has Gone, Why "LATAM is Under Construction" and the Next 10 Years Will Be the Best & Investing Lessons from Missing Nubank & OpenAI & Investing in FTX

Paul Graham · published Sep 2024

Founders are a rare exception to the rule that if everyone around you disagrees with you, you're probably mistaken.

VCs who haven't been founders don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs as a class include some of the world's most skillful liars.

source Founder Mode

Zach Perret · published Oct 16, 2024

Founders should not do most of what VCs tell them to do

Scope: not the same as ignoring VCs or telling them they're wrong

45:33 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid

Fabien Pinckaers · published Feb 12, 2025 · hedged

Investors add value by pinpointing issues and challenging the founder, but the solution must always come from the founder

Spending only a few hours a month on the business, they can never be as deep in it as the founder; treating their input as instructions leads to mistakes

Scope: "it's hard to say"; applies to investors participating only two to four hours a month

66:11 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

Johannes Reck · published Jun 23, 2025

Their main mistake was listening far too much to VCs, going to board meetings looking for advice on strategy instead of pushing the strategy they saw working

As young founders without a clue they lost their own way and outsourced strategy to the board

Scope: about the post-Series A period

31:39 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide

Johannes Reck · published Jun 23, 2025

Founders gain far more respect from their board and investors by being opinionated and pushing back than by agreeing with every VC suggestion, and this makes subsequent rounds easier to raise

When they went against the board and stated their own focus, VCs said 'we follow you'; Spark invested because it saw them reshape the company on their own conviction

37:46 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide

Paul Graham · published Oct 2006

Founders should listen to investors for insight but must not let them run the company.

Running the company is the founders' job; if investors had the vision to run these companies they would have started them.

source The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Sam Corcos · published Dec 11, 2023

Founders should take experienced investors' opinions seriously but never as gospel, because nobody actually knows anything — the investor is quite likely wrong and so are you

Investors have far more exposure than you, but once you've been around long enough you realize everyone is just making their best guess, so the goal is to run decision cycles as fast as possible

Scope: deference is a serious risk specifically for early-stage founders

45:13 20VC: Why Founders Should Take as Many VC Meetings as Possible, Should Founders Meet Associates, How to Get Intros to the Best VCs, How To Extract the Most Value From Your Investors, Why Post IPO Operators Are the Best Angels with Sam Corcos @ Levels

Rick Zullo · published Aug 23, 2023

Investor influence depends on two things: whether the founder opts into hearing it, and whether the board has voting control

If a founder doesn't want to hear it, advice is dead air; if the board controls the company, founders listen more

16:08 Investor influence depends on founder buy in and board voting control

Jason Lemkin · published Aug 23, 2023

The dynamic that ignoring your investors will cost you when you need a bridge is lost on roughly 95% of founders today

Founders are either too distracted by immediate fires, assume they'll deal with it later, or assume the next round will come; the point is too subtle to resonate

16:57 Ignoring investor advice costs founders when they need a bridge though most dont see it

Harry Stebbings · published May 8, 2024

The majority of founders do not actually want feedback from their investors

5:10 Most founders dont actually want investor feedback

Johannes Reck · published Jun 23, 2025

Having survived earlier crises made them naively overconfident about COVID, and dismissing their investors' call for contingency plans was a mistake

They told the board they had managed crises like the 2015 Paris attacks and would manage again; three weeks later revenue was literally zero with 600-700 employees

46:31 Past success breeds overconfidence that wrongly dismisses valid investor warnings

Paul Graham · published Sep 2022 · hedged

Founders often fail to act on advice not mainly out of stubbornness but because startup advice is counterintuitive, and counterintuitive advice sounds wrong, so they don't believe it until experience teaches them.

So much about startups is counterintuitive, and when you tell someone something counterintuitive it sounds to them like it's wrong.

source Founders dont act on counterintuitive advice because it sounds wrong until experience proves it

Paul Graham · published Oct 2006 · hedged

Angering investors by ignoring them is less dangerous than caving in to them.

In his own startup, disputes drained energy but giving in would probably have destroyed the company; half the attention of founders who know what they're doing beats the full attention of investors who don't.

source Ignoring investors is safer than caving in since half the attention of competent founders beats full attention of investors who dont know