The best entrepreneurs constantly “read the room” (or the market) and adjust their presentation style, their mannerisms, their product description, their team, their focus, their advisors — everything. They have the smallest number of axioms (things they accept without questioning). Everything else is subject to questioning, upgrading, and re-synthesis. Particularly since almost invariably they started off at a “local maximum” in terms of talent and advice.

I call this the “comma MBA” problem. One time we had a nice fellow from Canada come pitch us, and on his business card he had his name, followed by “MBA” in the same way a doctor would put “MD.” His slide deck referenced his MBA, his pitch mentioned how everyone is “good at business” because they have business degrees, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with an MBA (well, maybe 😂). But what he thought was a positive was not resonating, and he just…didn’t get that hint. And to show I’m not trying to cast shade at MBAs, one time we had a CEO talk about how amazing his tech team was because of their “.NET” prowess — the technical version of the “comma MBA” problem above.

But let’s take a step back. Imagine that in our MBA friend’s small town, he went to the local business celebrity who seemed very wise, saying “make sure to emphasize the fact that you have an MBA! Otherwise the VCs will not take you seriously!”

Both the good entrepreneur and the bad entrepreneur would seek advice from the same village elder. But the good entrepreneur would quickly learn and adjust from experience — “wow, that guy is wrong — I didn’t get the reaction/feedback I thought I would.”

The bad entrepreneur sticks to the village elder’s advice. The good entrepreneur upgrades his/her advisor when it’s clear that it’s a constraint. We consequently give people the benefit of the doubt when they show up with a metaphorical “comma MBA” mistake; the important thing is ensuring they are always trying to learn and upgrade from their metaphorical village elder and resulting priors. And sometimes the village elder is exceptional, too — but it’s statistically rare.

It’s part of why the founding team is so important. I like to say that there are only two jobs at a startup: selling the thing, and making the thing. That’s it. A very good technical person who knows nothing about sales can be bamboozled by a bad sales guy, and a very good sales guy can be bamboozled by a bad tech person.

Your co-founder ideally serves an “axiomatic” role. If you can’t implicitly trust your co-founder, you’re in trouble. That’s not to say that the co-founder must be the most talented person in the domain! Rather, because the co-founder isn’t angling for a promotion and has no political aspirations, she just wants what’s best for the company and understands how to make the right decisions. (One useful cultural value at a scaling company: “You should always be willing to hire your own boss.”)

You will constantly get bad advice. Your job is to know when to discard the advice, but also when the discard the *people* who are clearly meting out bad advice and not doing what’s best for the company. And ideally you surround yourself with talent where you don’t have to second-guess everything and can instead rely on your team — it’s the best way to scale yourself.