One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK.
The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours?
So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the context when you decide which advice to lean into.
A few years ago before planning our wedding, my mother said to me _You have to listen to advice, but you don't have to take it._ I don't have the best reputation for always listening - her point was that it's polite to listen and then it's up to you to judge whether the advice is right for you and the situation at hand.
Well said! People often ask me for my founder perspective, and I always say the following at the end of such meetings - This is just my point of view biased by my personal experiences. You should talk to more people and hear their points of view. And in the end you should make your own decision.
Definitely! It's also important to realize that many people are way too quick to give advice with limited information. Watch out for anyone who gives you advice quickly without taking the time to understand your situation. Giving good advice to a founder who is past the early stages and no longer a neophyte takes a fair amount of questioning and digging in. It's rare to find easy answers without tradeoffs. Even if someone is really smart or has been successful in the past, low-effort advice that they give you off the top of their head will often cause more harm than good if you follow it blindly.
Exactly because of the same reason you write about.
Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.
Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that for everyone.
Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that restaurant was not that great when you arrived.
There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing, "GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE!" Everything else is just iteration.
Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one.
I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.
Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.
I liked the thread a lot, but as with all things startup I feel a lot like this is trusting a very successful horse race gambler with his perfect method to track the form.
I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.
/21 dont listen to these advice because that only worked one time for one person (myself)
I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help anyone but still give them because that's what people want to read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone
My optimistic view is that I think it's more that they are providing a data point rather than a conclusion. If every founder writes their experience, then maybe readers will have a large enough sample to find some signal from the noise (luck of individual founders).
> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work.
There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
It really depends on the person. The people who naturally focus and can ignore distractions excel at WFH.
A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else.
In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams, most people assume they’re in the first category but many people eventually discover they’re actually in the second category.
WFH is great for some, but actually quite difficult for many others.
Linux TTYs is how I do it. If you press Ctrl+Alt+2, you can open a new terminal and run a new graphical interface. If you use a tiling Window Manager, you can have different "desktops" for every project. By switching you TTY, you move to that work environment where you have left your editor, tabs open, database editor, servers, etc...
I’m in the process of leaving a company who has sent half a dozen surveys to employees about how they think return to office should work, but not a single survey about what employees would like to see from a long-term WFH strategy.
It seems some hope to bait and switch their employees back into office and then say WFH isn’t allowed anymore.
Suhail seems to be spending a lot of time trying to establish himself as a thought leader. How does that square or not square with the goal of giving one's business the best chance of success?
The two themes I'm noticing from this list are "Lean heavily into a founders/startup community" and "Ask tough questions often". There are several bullets around coaching, bouncing ideas off of other (external) founders, leaning into internal cofounders strengths/passions, etc. I would generalize to say these things are not specific at all to the first 18 months at a startup (or startups in general). Leaders should be communicating with other leaders, teammates should be relying heavily on other teammates, all humans should seek counseling (via therapists, coaches and friends). A significant part of this process is knowing when to just smile and nod through unsolicited feedback/shitty advice. This is also totally unrelated to startups.
To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary. Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to objectively move forward with the findings of that examination. It's a tough ego game to play.
mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."
I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.
As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works).
After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
There are good pieces of advice in founders’ self-reported experience, but it needs to be taken as a distorted data point rather than absolute truth.
Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.
I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
Similar thought from me. My personal feeling is that the best founder advice comes from people who failed at least once (preferably more than once) before succeeding. And the best employee advice comes from people who've worked at a combination of "good" and "bad" companies. It's hard to have enough perspective to formulate good advice when your sample size is 1 (which could have been mostly luck).
Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good nuggets than actual advice (including this one)
I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)
I'll second this one as a founder and early employee at a couple of the recent IPOs. The definition of "successful" here must be that the product and revenue succeeded, not that the team did well within the company. Otherwise, you're just filtering for politicians.
The reason this works is that you're identifying the individuals who are able to make success happen while having the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.
The advise on how to take advise. In that case I would need to see advise takers that has failed a few times taking advise from successful founders giving advise before taking your advise.
Folks in this thread are assuming the author is trying to present a failproof method for creating a successful startup. But i don't think this is true. It seems more like simply words of advice.
With words of advice, you take what you can when it applies. But words of advice are hardly comprehensive or sufficient.
4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!
This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale, but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical phrasing for the phenomenon).
In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is paying customers.
8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology.
There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and I think it needs to be said more often.
There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the husband was often gone.
13/ If you're worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue.
2. If it's above the value, worry!
3. If it's below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore
I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.
17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users.
If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction.
If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.
When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come out tomorrow."
19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.
This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to think, to work without distraction, etc.
We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.
[+] [-] simonw|4 years ago|reply
The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours?
So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the context when you decide which advice to lean into.
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cutenewt|4 years ago|reply
Reading between the lines, it seems like this founder is telling others advice he's trying to tell himself.
[+] [-] jagath|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danenania|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozim|4 years ago|reply
Exactly because of the same reason you write about.
Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.
Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that for everyone.
Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that restaurant was not that great when you arrived.
[+] [-] josh_carterPDX|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|4 years ago|reply
It’s really not obvious that an unpromising startup could succeed, though.
What were the main factors in those unpromising startups doing well?
[+] [-] sparsely|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|4 years ago|reply
I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing, people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years of my life on the idea.
[+] [-] nprz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawthornio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|4 years ago|reply
I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.
[+] [-] potatoman22|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polote|4 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help anyone but still give them because that's what people want to read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone
[+] [-] loganfrederick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philshem|4 years ago|reply
https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...
[+] [-] enahs-sf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JCM9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonu|4 years ago|reply
There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else.
In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams, most people assume they’re in the first category but many people eventually discover they’re actually in the second category.
WFH is great for some, but actually quite difficult for many others.
[+] [-] csomar|4 years ago|reply
It gets you in the zone almost instantly.
[+] [-] ecf|4 years ago|reply
It seems some hope to bait and switch their employees back into office and then say WFH isn’t allowed anymore.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnabgib|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicalriddler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] void_mint|4 years ago|reply
To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary. Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to objectively move forward with the findings of that examination. It's a tough ego game to play.
[+] [-] kingsuper20|4 years ago|reply
mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."
I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.
[+] [-] tlb|4 years ago|reply
Here's a way to find startups that make something: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
[+] [-] codezero|4 years ago|reply
After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
Founder advice is for founders.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.
I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
Take everything with a grain of salt.
[+] [-] mdorazio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|4 years ago|reply
I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)
[+] [-] jchonphoenix|4 years ago|reply
The reason this works is that you're identifying the individuals who are able to make success happen while having the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.
[+] [-] m3kw9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vhs001|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|4 years ago|reply
4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!
This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale, but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical phrasing for the phenomenon).
In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is paying customers.
8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology.
There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and I think it needs to be said more often.
There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the husband was often gone.
13/ If you're worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue. 2. If it's above the value, worry! 3. If it's below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore
I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.
17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users. If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.
When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come out tomorrow."
19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.
This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to think, to work without distraction, etc.
We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.
[+] [-] arjunkava|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatiherikli|4 years ago|reply