Advice Startup Founders Should Not Listen To

This post was originally published on aleszivkovic.com

You don’t learn how to ride a bike by looking at other kids do it. Even then you had to go through all the stages of it yourself. Put the little wheels on, try. Take them off, try some more. Fall. Get hurt. Dust off. Get back up. Try some more. That’s how you learn how to do it. Startups are the same.

There’s a learning curve in founding companies also. And similar to that, the startup learning curve doesn’t get drawn by looking at it either. There is also no one that can teach you how to draw it just by talking you through.

The only way to draw it is by doing it. Just like you had to do it when you were riding that bike.

So if it is like that, why do we — the startup founders — ask and crave for advice? Is it because we really need it or is it because we need some reassurance that what we are doing is the right thing? Or maybe it is just easier to blame someone else later on if it doesn’t work out?

All in all, the only and best person to give advice is probably our own gut. And that’s because we are the ones that are by far most informed about the entire situation than anyone around us. And I can say that from experience. Whether we are going to act on it or not is a different story. Acting on intuition sometimes can be very frightening and takes a lot of courage.

When you know you need to kick half of your team out the door to take the company to the next stage of growth, your first instinct is probably to get advice.

You are probably not going to act on in without getting some advice on what other people say. You know, the experienced and wise ones. The ones that really know. But do they really know? How do they in fact know when they don’t work with you, they don’t work for you and they don’t live your life?

Probably not everyone is going to say that the fire-them-all is in fact a good idea and most probably, quite contrary, you will get little support for it. I am willing to bet that people are in fact going to say that you should think about it very very carefully — like you have not already — and give you some wise piece of advise like “you have to play with the cards you’ve got”. You don’t!

The issue with the advice you are given does not need to be in the fact that you are asking the wrong people. It does not even need to be because you are asking for the wrong advice. It is probably going to be because you are either asking for advice to act on it without making your own informed decision — the one based on gut feeling and your common sense — or just to take the blame of possible failure away from you.

Remember, these people are not in your shoes. They don’t run your company, manage your team. They don’t have your problems and fears. They don’t know what you work with and work against and what you fight for and why. So how can they know better if they don’t know the situation you’re in.

Taking advice as piece of information and processing it to make an autonomous decision is not the same as taking advice to act on it or disregard it completely.

Asking others for advice might be a good source of information. You can use their experience and knowledge and make it work for you. But blindly taking it and ignoring your judgement is completely different. It means acting on something that has nothing to do with you. You will maybe end up doing the right thing. But the right thing in the wrong situation is the wrong thing.

Even when listening to other startup founders and leaving all other smart management consultants and advisors out of it, you might be doing yourself no good. What you will likely get is an answer to what they would do in their shoes and in their situation and based on their experience. But they are not you and their situation is not yours. People are different and companies are different.

So, don’t take advice to justify your failures. Don’t take advice to disregard your own intuition. Take advice to make a better decision on your own. Decisions that are yours.