Zen & the art of startup advice

In my role as angel investor I talk to a LOT of entrepreneurs who think that having great advisors are necessary because of all the valuable advice. Unfortunately, I'm with Dalton - advice isn't all that useful.

I see the biggest problem with "startup advice" is the bias or an outright conflict of interest from most of these "advisors". They are usually trying to sell you something and anything they say has to be heavily discounted on that basis alone.

Incubators/accelerators are going to tell you that (surprise!) going through an incubator/accelerator is the best path to success (forget that most successes happen without incubators).

Angels are going to tell you they are the best source of seed capital (even though many won't do much beside writing one check).

VCs are going to tell you that you cannot scale without them (I am sure Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, etc really regret not being VC-funded).

Retired executives will tell you to do exactly what made them successful without bothering to check if that applies to your situation.

People who failed at something will try to convince you that you are going to fail at attacking the same field (never mind a totally different approach).

Engineers heavily invested in that open source project or the other will say that you are stupid not to use it.

Caveat Emptor! Beware geeks/investors bearing advice!

To quote Terence McKenna, "You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding."

We're never going to learn the absolute truth from reading startup advice, but even if absolute truth did exist it wouldn't do us any good. If nothing else, embracing uncertainty at least lets us learn what we're supposed to be paying attention to.

Startup advice is not meant be the ultimate guide to decision making , but to widen our knowledge and thought process.

I think we all knew this already. But now now does this article count as startup advice? If so, do we not take it seriously either? In all seriousness though, we should take startup advice with a grain of salt but at the same time realize that while most of it is contradictory that doesn't mean it's all worthless. The trick is to pick out what applies to your particular situation. If there are two conflicting pieces of advice that apply then you just go with your gut. Only you know what's best for your situation. It's always useful to learn what others think or have gone through. So yeah, it's all a bunch of feel-good contradictory stuff but it still has its worth. You can compare it to self-help which is often worthless but even then at least self-help gets you moving toward bettering your situation just like startup advice. Startup advice is like a very useful worthless thing. Yeah, it's both of those things at once.

The other issue I have with all this "advice" being dished out is that it often comes from people who simply aren't that successful.

And I don't mean you have to be the next Facebook but at the very least you need to be at a point where your startup is no longer a startup.