Key Takeaways
- Startup advice is almost always context-specific even when it is stated as universal.
- The best founders filter advice through their own situation, not against it.
- Understanding why a piece of advice worked for someone else is more useful than the advice itself.
The startup advice ecosystem produces an enormous volume of content, most of it sincere and some of it genuinely useful. The problem is not the advice itself. The problem is the way it gets consumed: as universal principles that apply regardless of stage, market, team, or timing.
Saim Abbasi has mentored more than a thousand founders since starting his first company, and the pattern he sees most often is a founder applying advice that was right for a different company at a different stage to a situation where it is either irrelevant or actively harmful.
The Context That Gets Lost
When a famous founder says "hire slow, fire fast," they are usually describing a specific phase of company building where they had the luxury of being selective because they had product-market fit and growing revenue. A pre-revenue startup founder who takes that advice literally and spends three months on a single hire while competitors ship product has misapplied a good principle to the wrong situation.
The advice was right. The context was unstated and crucial. That gap is everywhere in the startup advice ecosystem.
The Question That Fixes the Problem
Saim Abbasi teaches founders to ask one question before applying any piece of advice: what was the specific situation where this worked, and is my situation similar enough that the same logic applies?
That question is harder to answer than it sounds. It requires understanding not just what someone did but why they did it and what would have happened if they had done something different. The mechanics of good advice are usually less useful than the reasoning behind it.
Building Your Own Judgment
The goal of consuming startup advice should not be to accumulate a list of rules. It should be to build judgment that applies to novel situations your advisors have never faced. The founder who has deeply understood why customer discovery works in some markets and not others is better equipped than the one who follows a customer discovery protocol because Paul Graham said to.
Saim's advice to founders about advice: treat every piece of it as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. The hypothesis is worth testing. The conclusion might not be yours to reach.
"The most dangerous startup advice is the kind that worked once and was generalized into a law."