Which Advice to Take

At YC, there is no shortage of people giving you valuable, sincere, and experience-backed advice. The best advice I received was meta-advice: as a founder, your job is to figure out which advice to take and which to ignore. Ultimately, that judgment is what marks the path you will take.

This sounds obvious. It is not.

When you’re a first-time founder, advice from experienced people carries enormous weight. Someone who’s built and sold a company tells you to focus on sales. Another person who’s built and sold a company tells you to focus on product. Both are right — for the company they built. Neither may be right for yours.

The skill isn’t evaluating whether the advice is good. Most of it is good. The skill is evaluating whether it applies to your specific situation, with your specific constraints, at this specific moment. That’s a judgment call, and no one can make it for you.

One framework I’ve found useful: draw a 2×2 with impact and reversibility as the two axes. High impact, irreversible? Take your time. Low impact, easily reversed? Decide fast and move on. The amount of agonizing should be proportional to the stakes, and most decisions have lower stakes than they feel like they do in the moment.