The limits of advice
Gil Dibner

I had a few conversations over the last week about advice. VCs, investors, and board members often trade in advice. Put simply, we give a lot of advice, and we also introduce a lot of advisors. We are investors — not operators. Even those of us that were operators, are not operators anymore. We are supporting characters. Some of that support is moral support and psychological support. Some of it is practical support (introductions to customers). But an awful lot of that support basically boils down to advice — both direct and indirect. Direct advice is when we offer our advice directly to management. Indirect advice is when we say: “go talk to this person, she’s an expert on pricing, you should probably listen to her.”

We give this advice — both direct and indirect — with the best of intentions. But it is ultimately just advice. It’s colored by the specific experience of the advice-giver, but it’s rarely based on deep insight into the world of the advice-reciever. There are, therefore, real limits to advice and to how powerful and impactful it can actually be. Ultimately, it is the man/woman in the arena, the operator, who has the best perspective on what is plausible, useful, practical, and/or likely to work. I have worked closely (as closely as a mere “advisor” can work) with many companies and many founders, and I can attest from personal experience just how much work it is to ramp up and stay current on the challenges facing a particular company. It can take weeks or even months of learning about a market and building a rapport with a team before I feel comfortable really giving advice — and even then, it’s best to do it with a lot of humility and caution.

As a VC, I’m probably going to keep having to give advice — and I’ll try to do it as wisely and humbly as possible. So here are two pieces of free meta-advice for CEOs facing a lot of incoming advice and intros to more potential advisors with yet more advice:

• Talk to everyone, seek out as many opinions from experienced and well-meaning people as you can. But never forget the limits of this advice. Never forget that you as the operator — you and your team — are the ultimate arbiter of what is potentially useful advice and what is probably irrelevant garbage. That advisor that is meeting you for an hour, and starts to tell you how to run your business after 30 minutes might not actually be the source of wisdom you are looking for.

• Most important: remember that increased operational capacity is always more valuable than additional “advice.” In other words, adding a super experienced and super influential “advisor” to your roster can have some benefits if used wisely, but adding the right operational executive who is going to work 24/7 to actually solve the problem your advisor is just talking about is always going to be worth more. For example, we work with many companies that are working to make the transition from initial founder-led sales to professionalized sales. A lot of them seek out advice from experienced sales leaders. That advice — occasionally — is valuable and helpful to founders as they learn how to sell. But finding and hiring the actual executive who is willing to be that first sales leader in an early-stage company — that is pure gold. One year of a full-time employee is worth a hundred years of talking with advisors — no matter how good they are.

So that’s it. That’s my advice on advice. Take it with a grain of salt.

If you are building something awesome and want some free advice, reach out.

Gil

EVENTS

Mar 8 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

FROM THE BLOG

Principles for AI Product Design
Or how we could all learn a little from Google’s conversion optimizer.

Has Everyone Gone Chatbot Crazy?
Large language models have taken the (tech) world by storm, and all of a sudden it’s 2016 again.

Why (and How) Investing in Billboard Advertising Sometimes Makes Sense
Part I of a series on non-standard growth experiments.

The Hierarchy Trap
Hierarchy is an important tool for providing structure and alignment, but it can easily grow like a weed if not managed.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Israel/Security. Axis Security has been acquired for $500M by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for its SASE (secure access edge) product solution.
Israel/Security. Wiz raised $300M (now valued at $10B) for its cloud infrastructure security platform that enables organizations to rapidly identify and remove the most pressing risks in the cloud.
Israel/ML Tooling. Qwak raised $12M to provide enterprises with an end-to-end MLOps platform to build and deploy models at scale.
Germany/Health. Doctorly raised $10M for its administrative platform for medical practices.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Can stable diffusion read and visualize human thoughts? Researchers at Stanford University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore demonstrated how current generative AI models like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can map an fMRI image of the brain of someone staring at a given picture to an image based on its training set with the help of word prompts.

Facebook’s LLM model is hacked and put on torrent sites. The underlying model with the correct weights of Facebook’s LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) 65-billion-parameter large language model (GPT competitor) has been leaked on torrent sites for others to download (7/13/30/65 billion parameters, the smallest one is 14Gb, the largest one is 131GB, all four are 235Gb). Weirdly, Facebook hasn’t pulled down the link on their Github pull request section.

Monolith backends. Developers, such as Kelsey Hightower, are talking about Google’s latest open-source framework, Service Weaver, aimed at helping write backend applications. Service Weaver allows you to write applications as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices using custom deployers. It also claims it can hide the difference between RPC and local method calls which could save developers a lot of time building distributed applications.

HOW TO STARTUP

Breaking bad founder cycles. James Evans, founder and CEO of CommandBar, had a thoughtful tweetstorm covering ‘7 bad loops founders (especially B2B) get stuck in and tactical suggestions for how to get out of them’ — covering feature factories to obsessing over fundraising.
“Each of these got me outstuck at some point in the last 3 years
What these bad loops share:
1. driven by desire for external / social validation instead of a real success metric
2. feedback — the loop reinforces itself
3. FOMO — the fear that other successful startups are doing something obvious and easy that you have missed”

Bottoms up to enterprise sales continuum. Jordan Segall at Redpoint wrote a piece, ‘The Fallacy of Forever Bottoms Up For Devtools: The Power of Enterprise Sales’. Jordan took the S-1 (pre-IPO prospectus) from every major devtool company that went public in the last decade (28 of them). In sum. “What this means is that, even for companies with large swaths of bottoms up customers and lower ACVs, a top-down sales motion and larger-ACV strategy is nearly always added to a developer tool company’s strategy prior to going public”. Tangentially Jason Lemkin tweeted, The hardest segment of SaaS: Sales-led SMB sales, “CAC has to be really, really low”.

HOW TO VENTURE

Benedict Evan’s annual report. This year Benedict has focused his tech trends reports on The New Gatekeepers.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Tensorleap’s explainability platform is helping unlock the secrets of deep learning.

Groundcover’s CEO, Shahar Azulay, spoke on the Open Source Cafe podcast about shaping the future of observability with eBPF.

Reco’s CPO (and Angular Advisory Partner), Gal Nakash, was named to Forbes Israel 30 under 30.

Budibase’s CTO, Martin McKeaveney, was selected as one of Northern Ireland’s 30 under 30.