Read the context
Most founders avidly seek out knowledge, reading as much as they can. A large portion of what they read is often in pursuit of finding advice that helps them to be better founders.
Indeed, reading the right sources can have a transformative impact. Here’s Daniel Dines, the founder of UiPath looking back at the early days of the company, long before its recent IPO:
What changed my perspective was looking at new startups coming out of Silicon Valley. TechCrunch started talking about new start-ups, and then there was Y Combinator and then Paul Graham, one of my virtual mentors whose thinking really influenced me deeply.
That sense of ‘something’s happening’ reminds me of my own experience as a startup founder in Paris in 2010. At the time, advice was scarce and good advice even scarcer; many local interlocutors, however well-meaning they may have been, were leading founders in the wrong direction.
Part of that was because it was difficult to see what the best startup practices were. If a founder raised a pre-seed round from 10 individuals and then turned to their new shareholders for advice about a simple question, they’d obtain 10 very different answers. Therefore the whole process was counter-productive: instead of speeding things up, seeking external advice slowed things down and left most founders confused as to what path they should actually take.
It is no surprise, then, that many of us were going directly to the source and reading advice made in the USA. I remember purchasing the Pitching Hacks ebook, a fundraising manual co-authored by AngelList cofounders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi. Other popular English-speaking sources in the Paris startup communities were Paul Graham’s essays, Getting Real by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, blog posts by Ben Horowitz, and, of course, TechCrunch.
The problem with all these sources is that they obviously came with a US outlook. There were many underlying assumptions that weren’t valid in other startup ecosystems, and certainly not in the very different environment that was the Paris startup community. For instance, we were all applying the Pitching Hacks recipe for raising funds, but to absolutely no avail because local investors were behaving very differently from their counterparts in Silicon Valley.
This is why it’s not enough for founders to read the best writers on building startups and raising funds. You also need to be able to read the context. Who are the writers? What entrepreneurial ecosystem do they belong to? What are the underlying assumptions? Is their advice still valid in your context? If not, how should it be translated to account for the difference(s)?
This, by the way, was a major insight for founding The Family. When we launched in 2013, we were able to spot the best sources of startup content, but we were also determined to adapt that content to the local context of a lagging entrepreneurial ecosystem. This is at the core of what we do: the ability to read the context and act accordingly.
(Thanks to Toby Mather, the co-founder & CEO of Lingumi, for sharing Daniel Dines’s quote in the latest edition of his newsletter The Deliberate CEO.)
One of the key places founders go for advice is, well, other founders! If you’re thinking about taking the leap into entrepreneurship, join us next week at the First-Time Founder Summit 🤗