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, yes, and like we'll be your first customer, we'll 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 encounter 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 YY partner to try to debug something where someone has gone really far with questionable advice and dugs 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, yes, 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. Yes, 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 advisers and create a board of advisors. And that's essential. It would never even occur to someone right after my PowerPoint. That would never occur to a lot of people. Yes, but we just noticed there are folks who, you know, have a bunch of unusual ideas from my perspective. And when we try to debug why, what do we learn, Michael? What's the root cause? Yeah, 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 project. It's harder. That's harder. It's harder than a

blank slate, which is I don't know anything. Well, and it's funny is I. 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. I didn't either. It's like I didn't. Ignorance was a future 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. Like I'm trying to run my company. Well, shouldn't I be trying to find advice, right? Like aren't there 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, of course, 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. Yeah um are and try to meet and find those people and break into it as opposed to stay in some small town somewhere with there likely is local experts. It seems obvious when I say that metaphor. If you want to be an actor, you should do that or if you want who whoa whoa but like I know people in Boise, Idaho. It's where I grew up. Isn't that where isn't that where I'm going to have an advantage, you know, those people will talk to me. Yeah, when I go to LA, no one talks to me. And it's, you know, there's a lot of on-campus resources. There's a lot of resources um in various places and and the key thing to understand about a lot of places is their incentives may not be aligned with yours. Yeah, a lot of startup ecosystems exist to create jobs in the local economy, to stimulate the local economy for a variety 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. Yeah and so allot the advice is stay here. Don't get too big, etc., etc., etc. I mean you can speak. I mean we experienced this. It was funny. I experienced this at Yale, but I wasn't working on a startup so it didn't really take. But like there was this vibe of like New Haven's an innov 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. 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 Yale for trying to invigorate the New Haven economy? Like 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, yeah, and who've never worked at a startup. Or people that, you know, studied the Lean Startup manual, yeah. And so again, like 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. Like, It's Tricky, right? Yeah. 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 doing a startup's hard. And as nice as it is to watch a YouTube video, right, you can't talk to us. As nice as it is to read blog P marker or to read PG's essays, you can't talk to them. And like, you know, one of the things you talk about a lot is that some part of talking to an advisers about advice and like working through tactics, but a big part is just this sucks. Like, can we just talk about how bad this sucks for a second? Can I get a

little bit of therapy you know like yeah and you can't get therapy with the YouTube video 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 yep. It's Tricky CU often times I tell Founders it's like you should have people in your life a significant other friend uh family member who like you can go to and shit's 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 y. I also wonder sometimes like if this was 20 years ago you couldn't really consume content from these people but like nowadays yeah this is what interesting is I think you can get a lot from these online resources yeah 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 cuz it's like let's do like the rank order right.

like I we can debate what I'd prefer zero startup advice consumption or top 1% online. Yeah, like those are debating. Those are both better than like local bad advice. Yeah, 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 3 weeks. Like you want it? Maybe it's like let's have oatmeal. Worse, worse than nothing. It's worse than nothing. Yes. 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 bad plastic surgery from someone that is not great is definitely worse than not having it at all. Yes, that's worse. A great example, tattoos. I have the 100th

best tattoo artist. You don't have the hund. You've got the 100,000th. 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 someone's got to be their first, right? It's like, uh, 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. And it's your life. Like you only get to do it once, maybe twice in your life. You know, be you want to be picky about stuff like that. You want to be picky. Be picky about your startup advice. There you go. 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 you down or when someone like makes you believe this is going to happen fast or like this is a

big opportunity or like this is some Rule, and then you learn it's not, and then you're like, oh, like this is going to be this is this hard, this is going to be. 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, yes, and like we'll be your first customer, we'll be your first customer teach you innovation. No, it sounds so good, it sounds so good. There's a lot of these, and they don't work because, 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, negative, 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, you're like a product.

literally, you know, you're like, Okay, how many startups did we help, you know, great, 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, right? 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? Yeah, I don't. So, 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. That's one. And also, I think it's you honestly get more optimistic advice that's like just, Yes. Basically, a lot of what I would call Bay Area perspective is just talk to customers, yeah, just make something great, build a great product. Yeah, and a lot of what filtered through local advice is get a board of advisers, partner with big companies, strategy and patents, get a patent strategy, you be basically, it's all

involved in trying to network with the right people. Yeah, and the product is like an afterthought. It's so sad too because you know one of the funny things I think about with Bay Area advice um and investors. It's like they've seen it work. 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 Brunswick, New Jersey, every time they've said no to a startup investment, I bet they were right. Yeah, 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 that involves talking to customers and building things as opposed to, well, the strategy is some sort of complicated business.

corporate. Whatever. Yeah, that's probably not going to inspire you and cause you to build great things. All right, man. Good chat. Thanks. [Music]

The Problem With Startup "Experts"

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