All the Startup Advice You Read Is Wrong

But you should read some anyway

Editor’s note: Our founder and CEO wrote this piece about business advice back in 2013, but its timeless message is part of Marker’s DNA, so we are sharing it with you now. Enjoy!

There are two big problems with reading about what made other companies successful:

1. Correlation is not causation

Google is one of the most successful companies ever. Google gives its employees the ability to spend 20% of their time on whatever they want. Therefore, 20% time is a great idea. Is it? Or was Google successful because they’re brilliant engineers who solved the right problem at the right time—killing it despite the lack of focus “20% time” causes? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

Companies are not built in a lab. We are unable to run Monte Carlo simulations. And there are way too many variables and too much randomness for anyone to claim that if you add ingredient X or do A then B then C it will work.

What’s more, hindsight bias (the “knew it all along” effect), survivorship bias, and confirmation bias color every explanation anyone offers—whether they were there or not.

Side note: These problems apply whether the advice is firsthand (“Here’s what I did... ”) or secondhand (“Here’s how Google succeeded... ”), though firsthand is generally better, because the vast majority of writing about what happened inside a company by someone who didn’t work there is not only biased, it’s highly likely to have the facts wrong.

2. Everything depends

Even in a case where someone comes up with a truly great idea that improves the odds for many, many situations, it may be wrong for you. Your company is different. They all are. There are good ideas that apply to most companies, but I can’t think of any interesting ideas that apply to all companies.

How about the least-controversial and most common advice ever given: “Only hire A players.” Here’s when that doesn’t apply: when you can’t hire A players. The truth is, A players aren’t available to most companies. If these companies stuck to the hire-only-A-players rule, they’d never hire anyone. Sometimes you…