Giving advice

David Levy shares a postmortem from his startup, Tigerbow. As is David’s way, it’s both insightful and humorous.

I want to pull out this quote, which isn’t core to David’s overall post:

After one of the first times I presented Tigerbow at an event, someone walked up to me and suggested I reach out to Amazon for an integration opportunity. It was at this point that I became retroactively mortified for every piece of “advice” I ever delivered to former banking clients and investments. Really? I should think about partnering with Amazon? Well gee why didn’t I think about making that call?

Having been on the receiving end of advice like this I’m familiar with how useless it is. I’m also guilty of having provided it in the past (and, embarrassingly, I could very well be the person that David references).

Whether it be tactical or strategic, giving specific advice is difficult in these situations.

On one side, you have a founder who has thought deeply about the market for months or years. On the other side, you have someone who spent the past 15 min being introduced to the market, the company, the product, etc. How could anything specific come across as anything but shallow?

The right way to provide advice in these situations, whether it’s explicitly sought or not, is to share a framework or a set of first principles that, when applied to the specific situation, may help the individual advance his thinking.

Clayton Christensen has a good story about an exchange with Intel’s Andy Grove that’s relevant. Christensen sums up that “instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think.”