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.
And like they will be your first customer.
We will teach you innovation.
All right, 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 encountered 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 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, they just kept their head down.
And so they don't even, they haven't had the chance to develop bad habits or strange ideas about how 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.
It would never even occur to someone right after my PowerPoint day.
That would never occur to a lot of people.
But we just noticed there are folks who have a bunch of unusual ideas from my perspective.
And when we try to debug why, what do we learn, Michael?
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 than a blank slate, which is I don't know anything.
Well, and it's funny is I, you know, I can't speak to you, but when I think back to my first days of startup, like I didn't, I didn't know anything.
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, Mike.
I'm trying to run my company well.
Shouldn't I be trying to find advice, right?
Like, aren't their best practices, shouldn't I learn them?
I think the metaphor that I would use is that most people want to be in the big league, so to speak.
They want to be at the highest level of their industry if you want to be doing a venture funded startup at least.
If I were to give advice to one of my children that wanted to be an actor or want 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 are 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
It seems obvious when I say that metaphor, if you want to be an actor, you should do that.
But like I know people in Boise, Idaho.
Isn't that where I'm going to have an advantage?
Those people will talk to me.
When I go to LA, no one talks to me.
There's a lot of on-campus resources, there's a lot of resources in various places.
The key thing to understand about a lot of places is their incentives may not be aligned with yours.
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.
And so all the advice is, stay here, don't get too big, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, we experienced this.
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 is your fertile ground.
And man, it's such a weird, in hindsight, it was like, that's not.
fertile ground, like that's not where big companies are coming from.
But to your point, like, can you blame me all for trying to invigorate the New Haven economy?
Who are you going to hire to work on those things?
What's crazy is I meet a lot of founders who have talked to a lot of people to get started advice and it's people that worked at big companies and who have never worked at a startup or people that, you know,
Study the lean startup manual.
And so again, like it's, 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.
Ever helped anyone who's worked as an actor.
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 startups hard and as nice it is to watch a YouTube video, right?
As nice it is to read blog p marker or to read PG's essays.
And like, you know, one of the things we talk about a lot is that some part of talking to an advisor is about advice and like working through tactics, but a big part is just
Can we just talk about how bad this sucks for a second?
Can I get a little bit of therapy?
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.
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 and shits down, but you're not going to get startup advice from them.
You're going to get the like, when things are hard, you should still stick with them.
Like life advice from them.
I also wonder sometimes like, if this was 20 years ago, you couldn't really consume content from these people, but like nowadays,
Yeah, well, what's interesting is I think you can get a lot from these online resources.
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, we can debate whether I'd prefer zero startup advice consumption or top 1% online.
Like those are like debating.
Those are both better than like local bad advice.
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.
It's like, let's have a meal.
What are other examples of worse than nothing?
I guess one that I notice watching television, reality television sometimes, is plastic surgery.
And I think one way to say it is...
A bad plastic surgery from someone that is not great is definitely worse than not having it at all.
I have the hundredth best tattoo artist.
You don't have the hundredth.
You've got the hundredth thousandth.
You know, you're kind of stuck with that.
Tattoo is a perfect example.
Oh, this is the first time they've ever done a tattoo.
Yeah, but everyone's got to be there first.
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.
You only get to do it once, maybe twice in your life.
You want to be picky about stuff.
Be picky about your startup advice.
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.
Yeah, 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.
And like they will be your first customer.
We will teach you innovation.
There's a lot of these and they don't work because like the motivation, like you said, motivation is unaligned.
Yeah, if I'm some big car company with an innovation lab, my motivation is not to invest in the car company that disrupts me.
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 like a product.
You know, you're like, okay, how many startups did we help?
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.
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?
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.
And also, I think it's, you honestly get more optimistic advice that's like just, basically a lot of what I would call Bay Area perspective is just talk to customers, just make something great, build a great product.
And a lot of what filtered through local advice is get a board of advisors, partner with big companies, get a patent strategy.
Basically, it's all involved on trying to network with the right people.
And the product is like an afterthought.
It's so sad too, because one of the funny things I think about with Bay Area advice and investors is like,
Yes, that makes you more optimistic.
It makes you way more optimistic.
It's like, you know, I thought this thing wasn't going to 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 startup accelerator in my hometown of East Project, New Jersey, every time they've said no to a startup investment, I bet they're right.
I bet they've got no misses.
So yeah, so consume good advice.
And hey, maybe it's not us, right?
Like you could say not, there are many options, right?
But I think we're probably better than the, you know.
And look for stuff that inspires you and then evolves talking to customers and building things as opposed to, well, the strategy is some sort of complicated business, corporate, whatever.
That's probably not going to inspire you and cause you to build great things.