(Posted by Aaron Harris, Y Combinator Partner Responsible for Series A)
“Find yourself a teacher, make a friend and judge everyone from the best side”
- Pirkei Avot
We recently announced the launch of a new version of Startup School . As part of this, we've created a library of the best tips we've written in the past. This is a very solid collection that got me thinking about the nature of what we call advice. Specifically, I pondered the question that founders face: what to do with so many tips?
At first glance, this is not a problem at all. A decade ago, there were quite a few high-quality guidelines for startup founders. There were some great essays from Paul Graham and Mark Andreessenand there was quite a bit of bad advice. The opportunity to consult with someone in person was even more scarce. There were simply not many people who launched startups in the recent past or who could give early stage startups easy access to someone more experienced.
The rapid growth of the early-stage startup finance ecosystem has changed this dynamic. Now there are hundreds and even thousands of people with at least some experience in startups. Most of them are ready to help / give advice to a number of people who will ask them about it. This is both a great blessing and a scourge of the startup industry.
In the first case, a large group of people helping each other is an undoubted positive. Those who want to start a startup get more connections, knowledge and resources for this - and they do it faster. The scourge is that there are too many places where you can turn for advice and help.
Approx. per .: Adviser (adviser) is an established expression in the startup environment, literally translated as an adviser, a consultant.
When a startup founder can turn to numerous sources for advice and help, it becomes easier for him to delay making decisions, justifying it with the rational argument that he is just trying to get it “right” from the beginning. This is dangerous for two reasons. First, the main enemy of a startup is time. It's better to make a bad decision and iteratively come up with something better than to spend a lot of time trying to make the perfect decision and later discover that it isn't quite right.
In working with startups, I've found that good founders usually have a clear idea of what they want to do before asking questions. They go astray when trying to avoid a wrong decision, they turn to different people for confirmation of a particular idea. At YC, we call this “shopping for advice,” and it usually ends up with a long period of nothing happening, or the disappointment of the founders that no one is supporting what they want to do. The best a founder can do is either a) listen to the first advisor and change course, or b) try to do what was planned as intended and see how it goes. Understanding this means accepting the fact that most likely any decision you make as a startup founder, no matter how cool advice you might be armed with, will be,most likely wrong. This seems counterintuitive because we expect the advisors to know a lot and give the right advice. However, no advisor is able to dive into the entire context of your business, so at best you will get general guidelines or frameworks for thinking about problems.
“Find yourself a teacher” is a Mishna quote that is the core of Judaism's oral law. The idea is that there are many sources of opinion to follow and many experts to consult with in pursuit of your goal. However, the key to success is finding just one expert and accepting that he is the only person you consult, that he is the person you turn to for advice and guidance.
For a founder, this means that this advisor will only be a source of information and knowledge, feeding your thinking, and not someone who will make decisions for you. Choosing just one advisor also means you don't get all the possible points of view on an issue, but that should never be the goal when getting advice in business. The goal is to find someone who challenges your way of thinking and improves your prospects without forcing you to do exactly what they would do. This means accepting the fact that this person does not always have a good answer for you, sometimes he will not be available at all and may even give you bad advice.
Founders who seek excellence in their advisors pursue impossible ideals. No investor or advisor I have met is perfect or close to it. The strength of the best advisors lies in their ability to think through new and complex ideas with a clear awareness of their own subjectivity. These people admit they don't know something, avoid giving overly prescriptive advice, are good at listening, and crave new knowledge. Perhaps the most important thing about the best advisors is their unbreakable optimism about your potential and your business. Find a teacher who has these qualities and an understanding of when to stop listening to them.
Translation: Lyova Pyzhov
If you want to help with translations of useful materials from the YC library - write in a personal, @jethacker cart or mail alexey.stacenko@gmail.com
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