Many of the founders I have spoken to 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 that most startups have a board of advisors. 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.
“There is so much information out there, you end up driving yourself crazy,” said Devin Lennon, founder of end-of-life advice service Death Doula Devin. “Figuring out who is more helpful than others was difficult. Typically people with more experience tended to be more helpful, but not always,” said Hardbound founder Nathan Baschez. “We wasted a lot of time talking to the wrong people.”
According to Ryan Williams, CEO and co-founder of proptech platform Cadre, “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.”
Some founders said they developed frameworks for sifting through information that were based on an advisor’s experience: “Anyone you are taking advice from has to have a track record: Could be they started and sold, could be they raised,” said Kelly Peeler of NextGenVest.
When it comes to getting more targeted guidance, Ellie Buckingham, founder of The Landing, said doing due diligence before reaching out for help can save time later.
“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.”
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,'” said Zeta founder Aditi Shekar.
Said Zander Rafael, founder of Climb Credit, “I need to keep making decisions quickly even while knowing many of the decisions will end up being wrong … but most will be fixable.”
“I learned not to do anything manually more than three times,” said Kelly Peeler, founder of NextGenVest. “If a task needs to happen more than three times, I need to automate it or create a process.”
Clark* founder Megan O’Connor sets a 24-hour time limit for making decisions: “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.”
Sergio Monsalve, a venture partner at Norwest, said the ability to make judgment calls is crucial for founders.
“Judgment is the most determining criteria for if a founder will be successful. We look at two 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.”
Through many of these conversations I realized that founders initially use decision frameworks, some homegrown, 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 judgment calls.
To summarize, founders described using the following tips to sift through information overload:
- Control the narrative of the advice you’re receiving and try 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.