Your Best Advisors: Experienced Founders

TL;DR Nutshell: While great advice for a founder team can come from all kinds of sources, nothing comes close to matching the value of advice from other founders (preferably local ones) who have been through the exact same fire themselves, and made it to the other side.

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Suddenly, everyone who just shows up to school gets a participation trophy, every lawyer with small clients is a ‘startup lawyer,’ and everyone who can pull a few strings is a startup ‘advisor’ or ‘mentor.’ While there are truly great advisors/mentors out there, I see founders constantly wasting time, equity, and in some cases money on people who have very little substantive value to deliver to an early-stage technology company.

While the above-linked post gets more in-depth into the source of the problem, this one is about one specific type of ‘advisor’ that every single founder team should have: other experienced founders; specifically founders who have gone through a successful fundraising process, dealt with the nuances of founder-investor relations (preferably with the same/similar types of investors), and either achieved an exit, failed (you can get great advice from people who failed), or are still going strong.

Cut Through the PR

Given how easy it is to orchestrate personal branding and online PR that obscures the truth, every founder team needs people to talk to, privately and confidentially, to get direct, relevant, unvarnished advice; the kind that doesn’t make it onto twitter or blog posts. And there’s no better place to find that advice than experienced founders. 

Want to know what it’s actually like to work with a lawyer? You don’t ask other lawyers, or google, or other people in the market who know her; you ask her clients. Want to know what it’s actually like to work with a specific VC? You don’t ask twitter, or angel investors, or people who run accelerators. You ask their portfolio companies. And more specifically, within those companies you don’t ask the CEO put in place at the first large round and who managed to negotiate the ‘founder’ title for himself; you ask the original founder team that took the first check.

I can’t tell you how often founders will ask the wrong people about a lawyer, a VC, an accelerator, or some other service provider, and then get a complete 180 degree, unvarnished perspective when they ask, off the record, the direct ‘users’ of those people. That’s how you find out that the X lawyer who is ‘extremely well respected and well-known’ happens to take a week to respond to founder e-mails; or that Y ‘well-connected’ VC uses shady tactics to coerce founders into accepting unfair terms. You won’t get it from twitter. And you won’t get it from people who didn’t sit directly in the founder chair. 

There is a world of difference between talking to people who know about the challenges of being a founder v. those who lived them.

Finding Experienced Founders

Don’t expect seasoned founders to be running around town doing free office hours for random founder teams with an idea and hope. They’re not mother teresa. They’re sought-after, extremely busy people, and expect to have their time respected just like anyone else. So hustle to connect with them just like how you hustle to connect with other important people. Meetups, LinkedIn, Twitter, Accelerator Alumni Networks, etc. While I have serious reservations about lawyers connecting clients directly to investors, I think great VC lawyers are excellent connectors to experienced founder teams, as long as the ‘intro request’ makes sense.

But you can know that most excellent founder CEOs I know, even the ‘tougher’ ones, have a special, soft place in their heart for other founder CEOs fighting the same fight. Despite the fact that their advice is probably some of the most valuable you’ll ever find, they’re often the last people to ask for ‘advisor equity’ in exchange for their advice. Although that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t voluntarily offer it to them.

In short, very very few founder teams can make it very far purely on their own judgment. They need independent advisors to consult with on relevant issues. But most advisors don’t have first-hand knowledge of the core challenges of being a founder, and therefore aren’t qualified to advise on those issues. That knowledge lies with experienced founders. Find them.