When it comes to building startups I believe that most advice is bad. In fact I’d go further and say that most advice in general is bad.

Advice is bad when it makes assumptions - it assumes its true; it assumes there is a right way to do things; it assumes that what worked yesterday is going to work tomorrow; it assumes incentives are the same; and it assumes that people want it.

Yet it’s everywhere. It comes from investors, other founders, thought leaders, employees, the endless ‘playbooks’, and yes, from coaches and advisors like me. [Now I’m giving you advice to not listen to bad advice so you’re faced with a decision - is that bad advice and should I listen to it?]

Advice is different to information or stories. It has a directive tone intended to be consumed whole vs. a story which is open to interpretation. It’s why I favour an honest memoir like Shoe Dog that tells the story of the early days of Nike; over the many books spoon-feeding advice.

Insulating yourself from bad advice doesn’t mean being obstinate. It doesn’t mean refusing to learn and adapt. It’s about scrutinising advice and not allowing bad advice to diminish the conviction needed to do hard things without being knocked off course.

When advice assumes its true

There is no small irony to me that in an industry which prides itself on cutting edge innovation there are so many ‘playbooks’ proposing simple recipes for success and so many people willing to accept those playbooks as true. The number of companies I’ve seen trying to adopt ‘The Spotify Model’, blissfully unaware that not even Spotify does the Spotify Model. (I know many folks who’ve worked at Spotify over the years who’ve all said the same thing). That’s not to say that ‘The Spotify Model’ is a lie, just that it’s an overly neat view vs. the messy reality on the inside. This is true of almost all playbooks in my experience.

But this isn’t limited to playbooks. Advice, however its served up, often presents a sanitised version of history for public consumption, and/or one person’s perception of what drove success at the time. But I think we’re all much worse at identifying what was truly causal than we think. Maybe the company succeeded in spite of that decision rather than because of it? Maybe the true drivers of success lay elsewhere?

When advice assumes there is a right way to do things

I’ve worked with enough founders and enough companies to know that there is no one path to follow, it’s more like hacking your way through the jungle.

Of course you can learn from others, seek inspiration and build new skills - the most successful founders I know are veracious learners - but this learning is done to hone their own way of doing things - not to copy and paste.

For some constrained tasks there’s a right and wrong way, but it’s hard to think of many tasks a founder faces that fit that description. Mostly the idea of ‘right’ is either just a currently accepted norm, or an illusion; and advice based on the logic - ‘this worked for me therefore it’s the right way’ - is flawed.

When advice assumes that what worked yesterday is going to work tomorrow

Never before has company-building advice gone stale more quickly than right now in the age of AI.

But even in the absence of AI - industry, market, culture etc. are always evolving, so even if there were a right way to do things and even if advice were true at the time, by the time you’re hearing it, it’s often out of date. The moment you’re responding to is different to the moment the advice was intended for.

As an avid reader of history, I believe a lot can be learnt from the stories of the past, but specific advice is mostly served out of context.

When advice assumes that incentives are the same

The most obvious example is investors. Even the most supportive and thoughtful investors have different incentives to a founder. Their eggs are sat in lots of baskets whilst a founder’s are sat in one. The game they’re playing relies on big risk taking, lots of failures and one or two successes; and any advice is laced with those incentives.

At GoCardless - now a multi-billion dollar payments company. Each board meeting, one particular investor would pitch ‘lending’ as the next big thing, and dismiss anyone who highlighted the multiple ways it could quickly bankrupt the company. He might have been right, we’ll never know. But his dismissal of the downside was a vivid example of differing incentives that's stuck with me ever since.

And I see that dynamic play out often - just last week, a web3 (but not crypto) founder client was battling with investors advising him to pivot into cryptocurrency.

Beyond investors, the same argument can be made for advice from most sources - even a fellow founder with no skin in the game is typically going to offer advice based on what they believe to be important as an outcome for you and the company, not what you believe.

When advice assumes that people want it

Home truth no.1 - people mostly don’t want advice - in my experience, even when people ask for advice, most of the time what they really want is to be properly listened to.

Home truth no.2 - giving advice is more about the giver than the recipient - this might be hard to hear for those who regularly offer advice. Often they do so with noble intent. But giving advice is all-too-often an ego stroke for the giver rather than actually for the benefit of the recipient.

Despite most advice falling foul of at least one of these assumptions, founders often seek a lot of it. I understand why - they’re playing a hard game, with the odds stacked against them, and no rulebook on how to play it, frequently asking themselves ‘is this normal?’ or 'am I doing the right thing?’.

Advice seems like a path to conviction - a founder’s strength of belief in the vision and their ability to make it a reality. And conviction is important, it’s as close to a universal trait of successful founders as I’ve observed, based on my own incomplete dataset and the acknowledgement that the founders of the future may well look different to the founders of the past.

But there’s a cruel irony that the very advice founders seek to build conviction, often has the opposite effect - sowing seeds of doubt where they don’t belong.

Bad advice can distract, knock things off course, or even lead to the failure of the company so this calls for insulation. That might start with scrutinising the advice you receive. Does it make assumptions that render it ‘bad’? Is it true? Is there a ‘right way’ for the thing you’re trying to do? Is it a reflection of the here and now as well as the past? Is the person delivering it playing the same game as you? Do you even want it?

And it might involve building conviction through other means - here are just some of the tactics I’ve seen others use to that end:

• Writing - writing clearly (without ChatGPT) means thinking clearly.

• Deep thinking time - with or without writing.

• Finding the courage to disagree - new things are likely to be contentious to some but disagreement can be uncomfortable.

• Becoming the domain expert - knowing more about a particular topic than anyone else.

• Surrounding yourself with independent thinkers - do the people around you challenge your thinking? Do they hold high conviction in things?

• Getting outside the bubble - if you read the same articles, listen to the same podcasts and hang out in the same circles then the amount of unique stimuli you’re exposed to is limited. Conviction can come from uniqueness which in turn is linked to what you consume.

So in essence, my only advice is to listen to less of it - whether or not you listen to that is up to you!

An experiment

Carve out some time this week to something that will help you build conviction?

A question

What’s one thing you believe that others often disagree with?

A resource

I’m just about to finish the book ‘Patriot’, written by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned by Putin and then died in a penal colony in early 2024. It’s an inspiring read for a host of reasons, not least the levels of conviction, optimism and cheeriness Navalny displays throughout the most testing of life circumstances.

An ask from me

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