As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works).
After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
There are good pieces of advice in founders’ self-reported experience, but it needs to be taken as a distorted data point rather than absolute truth.
Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.
I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
Similar thought from me. My personal feeling is that the best founder advice comes from people who failed at least once (preferably more than once) before succeeding. And the best employee advice comes from people who've worked at a combination of "good" and "bad" companies. It's hard to have enough perspective to formulate good advice when your sample size is 1 (which could have been mostly luck).
Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good nuggets than actual advice (including this one)
I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)
I follow Suhail, and he was the founder of a competitor of mine, the stuff he's working on now is really interesting and a lot of the technical challenges the team are working on are fun and interesting.
He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
I'll second this one as a founder and early employee at a couple of the recent IPOs. The definition of "successful" here must be that the product and revenue succeeded, not that the team did well within the company. Otherwise, you're just filtering for politicians.
The reason this works is that you're identifying the individuals who are able to make success happen while having the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.
The advise on how to take advise. In that case I would need to see advise takers that has failed a few times taking advise from successful founders giving advise before taking your advise.
After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
Founder advice is for founders.