Founders are Made, Not Born: How Founders Become Learning Animals (Part IV)
Part IV: Navigate Advice Overload with Frameworks & Conviction
This is the “Founders are Made, not Born: How Founders Become Learning Animals” series, based on my Stanford Masters of Education research about founders & learning. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Extensions: Parts 7 and 8.
This article was first posted in Techcrunch.
“Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one”- Simone Elkeles
Many of the founders I spoke with said one of their biggest early challenges was figuring out how to sift through all the advice they receive. Advice overload plagues everyone and founders have it especially bad given a “board of advisors” is practically written into nomenclature of startup formation. Founders described needing conviction in their decisions and preserving carved out time for their own information processing. They viewed the ability to sift through all this advice as a crucial skill to learn.
On information overload — founders Devin, Nathan, and Ryan described the problem saying:
“There is so much information out there, you end up driving yourself crazy.”
Devin Lennon, Founder and CEO, Death Doula Devin
and…
“Figuring out who is more helpful than others was difficult. Typically people with more experience tended to be more helpful — but not always. We wasted a lot of time talking to the wrong people.”
Nathan Baschez, Founder of Hardbound
and…
“The real challenge is who you listen to for which points. You get information overload. The real skill is pattern recognition over time of who is actually useful for good information — knowing who to listen to, and for what. You get a lot of conflicting advice. That’s where I’ve grown the most.”
Ryan Williams, Founder and CEO of Cadre
Some founders developed frameworks for sifting through information based on experience:
“Anyone you are taking advice from has to have a track record — could be they started and sold, could be they raised.”
Kelly Peeler, Founder of NextGenVest
On how to get more targeted advice:
“We realized the payments system wasn’t up to snuff and tried to learn more to fix it. Half of the people we spoke to were dead ends. For anyone that turned out not to be helpful, it is useful to figure out why they weren’t — did they not actually build it? We’ve had to become more diligent to ensure each outreach is going to be more tightly relevant to what we’re trying to do. One process thing we’ve done for information seeking meetings is we’ll send our questions before the call and then on the call we say this is why we thought you were relevant.”
Ellie Buckingham, Founder of The Landing
Even if founders couldn’t control the input or shape the information they received, they made a conscious effort to continue making decisions at speed by using decision frameworks:
“I follow Jeff Bezos’ advice of if a decision is reversible, make it quickly, if it is not, then put more resources into researching before deciding.”
Aditi Shekdar, Founder of Zeta
and more frameworks…
“I need to keep making decisions quickly even while knowing many of the decisions will end up being wrong… but most will be fixable”
Zander Rafael, Founder of Climb Credit
and more …
“I learned not to do anything manually more than 3 times — if a task needs to happen more than 3 times, I need to automate it or create a process.”
Kelly Peeler, Founder of NextGenVest
and..
“I use a 24 hour problems rule. Nothing should go on too long. If I can’t decide after that, we need to seek outside advice. My solution is to nip it in the bud, stare it in the face.”
Megan O’Connor, Founder of HiClark
VCs said that the ability to make these judgement calls is crucial:
“Judgement is the most determining criteria for if a founder will be successful. We look at 2 things within judgement 1) ability to process information — it requires intellectual honesty and curiosity 2) large network, many cases and examples — can they learn from others’ mistakes. An analogy I use to describe this is that I’m looking for a founder with a fast cpu and large database.”
Sergio Monsalve, Venture Partner at Norwest
Through many of these conversations I realized that founders initially use decision frameworks, some home grown, some borrowed, to put rails on their information processing. Over time these frameworks, combined with the feedback and lived experience about how useful the frameworks were, leads to naturally making judgement calls.
To summarize, founders described using the following tips to sift through information overload:
- Control the narrative of the advice you’re receiving and trying to make it tighter
- Create rules around whose advice you listen to and whose you don’t
- Don’t dwell on it — use a decision framework to make rapid decisions
Founders, I’d love to hear any more insights you’ve gained about decision frameworks you’ve utilized and how you grew in your own intuition as you’ve become the leader you are today. Reach out anytime at mbent@lsvp.com
