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>Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. And some advice that I did not take was exactly right, but I only saw it

>Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. And some advice that I did not take was exactly right, but I only saw it in retrospect months later. Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. >Fundraising - being a YC company definitely opens doors, and also helps protects you from bad actors who have to think twice before fucking with a YC co. Very valuable for any first-time founder. I'd love to see this substantiated.

chimineycricket 4y ago
You can't expect them to be oracles though, right? Even the most experienced can give not-good-enough business advice, they don't do it on purpose I imagine.
- moremetadata 4y ago
  [dead]
- sp332 4y ago
  Sure, but the question in the thread is whether it's worth the money.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    And the answer, as with all "is it worth the money" questions, is "it depends".
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>>Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. // FWIW that does not mean the advice was wrong. Trivial example: "head East, there's a great bakery there", "I went West and found a place for a lovely lunch". Unless the parent elucidates (and maybe even then) you can't tell if the advice was right or wrong.
- quest88 4y ago
  Then why do you need the VC
  - vmatsiiako 4y ago
    VCs are not gonna help you build your company (doesn't matter if it's YC or anyone else). As a founder, you're the only one responsible about what advice to follow or not (and very often you get conflicting advice from two very credible sources)
  - groby_b 4y ago
    As much as I think VC is problematic: Those folks have a host of previous experience. When they share advice with you, it's a distillate of seeing lots of companies go through similar things. And that's all any advice is - "based on what I've experienced before, here's what I see". You never should take advice unevaluated, but it's additional data that might help you to come to a better decision. If that additional data is worth enough to you is a separate question, but there's certainly value there.
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    Because a lot of first-time founders have no idea what they're doing and other experts are at least experts whether they're 100% right or not. Anyone on Sand Hill is probably a better resource than some guy down the alley.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Honestly, maybe you don't. But, as a serial entrepreneur for more decades than I like to think about, I can confidently say that there is one thing that you really do need: you need access to people experienced in business, preferable a similar sort of business to yours. You need their advice. YC can provide that, and has paved the path for it. You can also get it through many other avenues. But whether through YC or not, your business will be more likely to succeed if you can learn from what other people have already done.
hungryforcodes 4y ago
Ah it could be if you learn from it-- which it sounds like they did. They would have learned mire imagine than if they had never had to make those choices and live with the consequences.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Only if what you learned is better than what you would have learned without that advice.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    "Better" can mean a bunch of different things, too. For example, if your business is headed for the rocks, mediocre advice that you get in time to enact it is much better than perfect advice that you get too late. What advice isn't, and can never be, is ironclad rules that you can just accept without consideration and expect to provide value. The real value of almost all advice isn't the part where it's telling you what to do -- it's the part where it's providing you with a new way of thinking about the problem.
  - hungryforcodes 4y ago
    We can't accoubt for stupidity true. Almost every situation I encounter is a learning opportunity. Even a repetitive one where you learn : "Gee, I shouldn't do that again." : is a lesson.
jjeaff 4y ago
No idea about whether bad actors would think twice, but if you are asking about whether having YC attached to your business opens doors, absolutely. I did a startup with a much less well-known incubator VC and that alone got us in so many doors compared to when you are trying talk with VCs on your own. Honestly, I think that is the one and only major benefit to doing an incubator. Unless you are just really green and need the support for things that maybe aren't on your radar like taxes and payroll and compliance, etc., the unknown unknowns. There are a lot of businesses with a great deal of traction that do incubators because it simply opens a lot more doors for VC investment. You would be surprised how little due diligence many investors actually do. Many will just invest in whatever $respected_vc is investing in. Assuming that $respected_vc has already done the due diligence.
JohnFen 4y ago
> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. This is true of literally every source of advice you'll ever encounter. It's not that the advice is right or wrong in an absolute sense, it's that how good the advice is depends on the context of it. So you always have to evaluate the advice according to your own circumstances. Some of it will be appropriate to you and some will not.
- jxramos 4y ago
  Yah, seeing that is a signal from others personal experience that you’re now entering into non-formulaic territory and need to put on the appropriate hat.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > This is true of literally every source of advice you'll ever encounter. Right, that's the point. If the main thing you have to say about some advice is a thing that's true about all advice, then that's not a good endorsement.
  - hassy 4y ago
    The main thing about the advice comes immediately before the bit you’re zooming in on. Want to talk to people who have seen hundreds of companies deal with what you’re dealing? YC is great for that.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Want to talk to people who have seen hundreds of companies deal with what you’re dealing? YC is great for that. The way I read your post, saying you "can get" very valuable advice immediately followed by saying some advice was wrong undermines that "can" pretty solidly. I'm not just looking at that sentence in isolation. Could we get an estimate of how much of the advice was right, weighted by how non-obvious each thing was and how much of an impact it would have to follow or not follow?
      - 4y ago
vmatsiiako 4y ago
The advice can't always be right. As a founder, I get a lot of (also unsolicited) advice every day, and it is the founder's responsibility to decide what advice makes sense in the current context. YC partners always emphasise that, and I really appreciate that. In general, I can only say positive things when it comes to YC advice (especially on the fundraising side - YC partners know A LOT about fundraising)
lr4444lr 4y ago
Substantiating as an early employee of a YC company. There is much honor among thieves, so to speak. EDIT - but to the OP's point, yeah, it's what you make of it. I would suspect that word could get out about founders who are rude or combative to important people as not being worthy of any veil of protection.
gumby 4y ago
> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. As others have commented, all advice is like that. The person offering it cannot know your precise situation, but just pattern match on what they hear. That's life. I turn this around the other way: if I am asked for my advice but the asker uses none of it, I don't feel bad, but stop offering advice. I'm clearly not the right person to be helping them. But the opposite is true too: if the asker takes 100% of my advice then they aren't thinking about their business (or whatever they're asking about). And so I won't offer them any more advice either.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Whenever I see interviews with YC advisors, they blame mistakes of founders of not taking their advice as the biggest as mistake. I don't have a strong opinion on this, and I believe YC is worth it, as 7% of nothing is still nothing, so any way a startup can decrease its risks is great.
  - indymike 4y ago
    > Whenever I see interviews with YC advisors, they blame mistakes of founders of not taking their advice as the biggest as mistake. This is normal human behavior. You did X and failed. If only you had done Y as I had suggested... Monday morning quarterbacking at it's finest.
    - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
      My experience is usually more like being told to do X, me saying X probably isn’t worth the time and energy, doing X anyway at their prompting assuming they’ll take some accountability for it going sideways, it ultimately going sideways because it was a bad idea, and then them taking zero accountability for their bad idea and not helping with the fact we’ve now been materially set back by the attempt. I’ve since learned to align our incentives around advice. If they’ll put their money where their mouth is to stand behind their advice, then it’s good advice. If they won’t, then it’s bad advice and I’m just their lab rat.
lazide 4y ago
I can’t speak for if it is better or not in YC land, but I can vouch for a truly amazing amount of scammers that salivate when they hear startup. It’s mind boggling. If someone makes a YC company legitimately happy, then using them with other YC companies would be both natural and a good way to filter out the scammers.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I can vouch for a truly amazing amount of scammers that salivate when they hear startup. It really is amazing, isn't it? Over the years, I've developed a few coping mechanisms. One of which is that I never tell people I'm an entrepreneur, and I never use the word "startup". I work for a business, doing <whatever the business does>. Outside of potential investors, nobody needs to know that the company is a startup running on my sweat and blood.
  - lazide 4y ago
    That is excellent advice, thank you.
Forgeties79 4y ago
Does it really need to be stated that you can learn a ton from advice you don’t directly take? It could be relevant later, get you to think up a different solution, help you understand a competitor’s business model or decisions, improve your understanding of the industry you’re in, etc.
rco8786 4y ago
> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. That’s how all advice works.
archgoon 4y ago
Advice does not need to be correct to be valuable. Simply getting a perspective on a problem, and a proposed strategy, can improve your ability to reason about your problem domain. If advice is wrong, and you choose not to follow it, then you know that people will ask about it later and you will be prepared to explain why you thought it was wrong; which is a better situation then saying to potential investors "Gee, never thought about that option." That is to say that advice, right or wrong, gives you information about the problem space and perspectives on it; which can be valuable if you evaluate said advice critically. As an example "You should always unit test your code" may not be applicable, but being able to say something like "This code is almost 100% dealing with External systems so a pure unit test would not be the appropriate way to test this code" is a better answer than "What's unit testing?" (Yes, I'm sure someone is going to quibble with this example :) )
mrobins 4y ago
Hearing both good and bad advice and making smart decisions is what a CEO’s job is. Get as much advice as possible but understand no one knows your business like you do. Being able to hit go hard on the right advice and go slow/ignore the bad is what makes a good leader.
iab 4y ago
This is the nature of all advice. If there was a surefire playbook to do X and get Y result, then everyone would do it surely?

chimineycricket 4y ago

You can't expect them to be oracles though, right? Even the most experienced can give not-good-enough business advice, they don't do it on purpose I imagine.

moremetadata 4y ago
[dead]
sp332 4y ago
Sure, but the question in the thread is whether it's worth the money.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  And the answer, as with all "is it worth the money" questions, is "it depends".

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

>>Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. // FWIW that does not mean the advice was wrong. Trivial example: "head East, there's a great bakery there", "I went West and found a place for a lovely lunch". Unless the parent elucidates (and maybe even then) you can't tell if the advice was right or wrong.

quest88 4y ago
Then why do you need the VC
- vmatsiiako 4y ago
  VCs are not gonna help you build your company (doesn't matter if it's YC or anyone else). As a founder, you're the only one responsible about what advice to follow or not (and very often you get conflicting advice from two very credible sources)
- groby_b 4y ago
  As much as I think VC is problematic: Those folks have a host of previous experience. When they share advice with you, it's a distillate of seeing lots of companies go through similar things. And that's all any advice is - "based on what I've experienced before, here's what I see". You never should take advice unevaluated, but it's additional data that might help you to come to a better decision. If that additional data is worth enough to you is a separate question, but there's certainly value there.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Because a lot of first-time founders have no idea what they're doing and other experts are at least experts whether they're 100% right or not. Anyone on Sand Hill is probably a better resource than some guy down the alley.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Honestly, maybe you don't. But, as a serial entrepreneur for more decades than I like to think about, I can confidently say that there is one thing that you really do need: you need access to people experienced in business, preferable a similar sort of business to yours. You need their advice. YC can provide that, and has paved the path for it. You can also get it through many other avenues. But whether through YC or not, your business will be more likely to succeed if you can learn from what other people have already done.

hungryforcodes 4y ago

Ah it could be if you learn from it-- which it sounds like they did. They would have learned mire imagine than if they had never had to make those choices and live with the consequences.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Only if what you learned is better than what you would have learned without that advice.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  "Better" can mean a bunch of different things, too. For example, if your business is headed for the rocks, mediocre advice that you get in time to enact it is much better than perfect advice that you get too late. What advice isn't, and can never be, is ironclad rules that you can just accept without consideration and expect to provide value. The real value of almost all advice isn't the part where it's telling you what to do -- it's the part where it's providing you with a new way of thinking about the problem.
- hungryforcodes 4y ago
  We can't accoubt for stupidity true. Almost every situation I encounter is a learning opportunity. Even a repetitive one where you learn : "Gee, I shouldn't do that again." : is a lesson.

jjeaff 4y ago

No idea about whether bad actors would think twice, but if you are asking about whether having YC attached to your business opens doors, absolutely. I did a startup with a much less well-known incubator VC and that alone got us in so many doors compared to when you are trying talk with VCs on your own. Honestly, I think that is the one and only major benefit to doing an incubator. Unless you are just really green and need the support for things that maybe aren't on your radar like taxes and payroll and compliance, etc., the unknown unknowns. There are a lot of businesses with a great deal of traction that do incubators because it simply opens a lot more doors for VC investment. You would be surprised how little due diligence many investors actually do. Many will just invest in whatever $respected_vc is investing in. Assuming that $respected_vc has already done the due diligence.

JohnFen 4y ago

> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. This is true of literally every source of advice you'll ever encounter. It's not that the advice is right or wrong in an absolute sense, it's that how good the advice is depends on the context of it. So you always have to evaluate the advice according to your own circumstances. Some of it will be appropriate to you and some will not.

jxramos 4y ago
Yah, seeing that is a signal from others personal experience that you’re now entering into non-formulaic territory and need to put on the appropriate hat.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> This is true of literally every source of advice you'll ever encounter. Right, that's the point. If the main thing you have to say about some advice is a thing that's true about all advice, then that's not a good endorsement.
- hassy 4y ago
  The main thing about the advice comes immediately before the bit you’re zooming in on. Want to talk to people who have seen hundreds of companies deal with what you’re dealing? YC is great for that.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Want to talk to people who have seen hundreds of companies deal with what you’re dealing? YC is great for that. The way I read your post, saying you "can get" very valuable advice immediately followed by saying some advice was wrong undermines that "can" pretty solidly. I'm not just looking at that sentence in isolation. Could we get an estimate of how much of the advice was right, weighted by how non-obvious each thing was and how much of an impact it would have to follow or not follow?
    - 4y ago

vmatsiiako 4y ago

The advice can't always be right. As a founder, I get a lot of (also unsolicited) advice every day, and it is the founder's responsibility to decide what advice makes sense in the current context. YC partners always emphasise that, and I really appreciate that. In general, I can only say positive things when it comes to YC advice (especially on the fundraising side - YC partners know A LOT about fundraising)

lr4444lr 4y ago

Substantiating as an early employee of a YC company. There is much honor among thieves, so to speak. EDIT - but to the OP's point, yeah, it's what you make of it. I would suspect that word could get out about founders who are rude or combative to important people as not being worthy of any veil of protection.

gumby 4y ago

> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. As others have commented, all advice is like that. The person offering it cannot know your precise situation, but just pattern match on what they hear. That's life. I turn this around the other way: if I am asked for my advice but the asker uses none of it, I don't feel bad, but stop offering advice. I'm clearly not the right person to be helping them. But the opposite is true too: if the asker takes 100% of my advice then they aren't thinking about their business (or whatever they're asking about). And so I won't offer them any more advice either.

xiphias2 4y ago
Whenever I see interviews with YC advisors, they blame mistakes of founders of not taking their advice as the biggest as mistake. I don't have a strong opinion on this, and I believe YC is worth it, as 7% of nothing is still nothing, so any way a startup can decrease its risks is great.
- indymike 4y ago
  > Whenever I see interviews with YC advisors, they blame mistakes of founders of not taking their advice as the biggest as mistake. This is normal human behavior. You did X and failed. If only you had done Y as I had suggested... Monday morning quarterbacking at it's finest.
  - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
    My experience is usually more like being told to do X, me saying X probably isn’t worth the time and energy, doing X anyway at their prompting assuming they’ll take some accountability for it going sideways, it ultimately going sideways because it was a bad idea, and then them taking zero accountability for their bad idea and not helping with the fact we’ve now been materially set back by the attempt. I’ve since learned to align our incentives around advice. If they’ll put their money where their mouth is to stand behind their advice, then it’s good advice. If they won’t, then it’s bad advice and I’m just their lab rat.

lazide 4y ago

I can’t speak for if it is better or not in YC land, but I can vouch for a truly amazing amount of scammers that salivate when they hear startup. It’s mind boggling. If someone makes a YC company legitimately happy, then using them with other YC companies would be both natural and a good way to filter out the scammers.

JohnFen 4y ago
> I can vouch for a truly amazing amount of scammers that salivate when they hear startup. It really is amazing, isn't it? Over the years, I've developed a few coping mechanisms. One of which is that I never tell people I'm an entrepreneur, and I never use the word "startup". I work for a business, doing <whatever the business does>. Outside of potential investors, nobody needs to know that the company is a startup running on my sweat and blood.
- lazide 4y ago
  That is excellent advice, thank you.

Forgeties79 4y ago

Does it really need to be stated that you can learn a ton from advice you don’t directly take? It could be relevant later, get you to think up a different solution, help you understand a competitor’s business model or decisions, improve your understanding of the industry you’re in, etc.

rco8786 4y ago

> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. That’s how all advice works.

archgoon 4y ago

Advice does not need to be correct to be valuable. Simply getting a perspective on a problem, and a proposed strategy, can improve your ability to reason about your problem domain. If advice is wrong, and you choose not to follow it, then you know that people will ask about it later and you will be prepared to explain why you thought it was wrong; which is a better situation then saying to potential investors "Gee, never thought about that option." That is to say that advice, right or wrong, gives you information about the problem space and perspectives on it; which can be valuable if you evaluate said advice critically. As an example "You should always unit test your code" may not be applicable, but being able to say something like "This code is almost 100% dealing with External systems so a pure unit test would not be the appropriate way to test this code" is a better answer than "What's unit testing?" (Yes, I'm sure someone is going to quibble with this example :) )

mrobins 4y ago

Hearing both good and bad advice and making smart decisions is what a CEO’s job is. Get as much advice as possible but understand no one knows your business like you do. Being able to hit go hard on the right advice and go slow/ignore the bad is what makes a good leader.

iab 4y ago

This is the nature of all advice. If there was a surefire playbook to do X and get Y result, then everyone would do it surely?