The only true advice in building a startup
Pivoting, persisting, and learning from Sari Azout
If you spend enough time trying to learn how to build a company, you will run into these pieces of advice:
Builders don’t pivot fast enough, they get attached to an idea, they want to prove to people they are not wrong. They’re more afraid to fail than they are determined to succeed.
Building great stuff takes time, you need to believe in it even when it seems obvious to everyone else that it won’t work.
It needs to be your life’s work.
It will change … a lot. Go look at the companies that went through Y Combinator and see what they are doing now. (I recently did this and the ones still alive are mostly doing something radically different than what they applied with.)
I believe all of these things, and yet on the surface they seem totally contradictory. How can something be your life’s work if it changes rapidly and completely?
That’s why the only true advice in building a startup is that there is no single piece of advice that is true about building a startup.
I was reminded of that when reading Sari Azout’s piece about the shutting down of Artifact. There is no topic more loaded for builders than the topic of pivoting or shutting down something that is not working. Any piece you read on that subject, including Sari’s great one, will mostly be a fortune cookie — you will read into it what you already believe about yourself. I’m pivoting too fast, or not enough. I care too much about the particular problem or solution, or not enough.
So should we block out all information? Quite the opposite. But if a single opinion gives you that pit in your stomach, it is the pit that is worth obsessing over, not the opinion.
There are no blueprints for building, but there are principles — deviating from them is where the pit comes from. You need to build things that you can lose yourself in, that can push you to grow and deliver the best work of your life. You need to be obsessed with cultivating intellectual honesty, mostly with yourself.
The rest is much more art than science. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read a ton of opinions from others. But just know that messiness is the enemy of compelling content, but it is the water all builders swim in daily.
My point is, to survive the process of building something you have to develop, trust, and become highly aware of your own instincts — to notice your reaction to information in some ways more than the information itself. And on that note, few people are better at marching to their own drum than Sari, and I had the pleasure of having her on the Unlock. I just published the episode, and if you want to hear from someone who thinks deeply and clearly on this stuff, look no further.