Don’t Drown in That Wave of Bad Startup Advice

“The availability and ubiquity of bad advice has exploded over the past few years,” writes Dave Lerner in How To Avoid Bad Startup Advice. Amen to that. He explains it very well:

Dave Lerner Amex OPEN bad startup advice

This is due to many factors, the primary one being the tidal wave of entrepreneurship washing across the country, which has brought to shore not only many great things, but also a great deal of flotsam and jetsam.
The tremendous personal broadcasting medium of Twitter, as well as blogs, have allowed for an extreme amount of entrepreneurship discussion and advice—so the bad and the good are now delivered via the same firehose and with the same breathless intensity. Who can you trust?

It’s easy to note that wave, and I’ve posted here on bad advice; but Dave, to his credit, offers a specific list of “red flags” to avoid. My favorite is this one:

You go in to talk about your consumer Internet startup and the first person you get paired-up with as a “mentor” is an IP attorney who encourages you to file some patents and “protect your idea.” (Translation: No one knows what they’re doing here—consumer Internet is not patentable, and you better start running away fast.)

That’s just one of several. His list is definitely worth a read.

Comments

  • Jeff Robinson @contrariansmind) says:

    Thank you for sharing Tim – Great article and he nails it. I liken it to cab drivers flipping real estate 6 years ago…A sign of trouble ahead for not only startups but for VC portfolios and the junk they have funded. Likely a great opportunity coming to sift through some carnage and do some restarts.
    Wishing you all the very best from beautiful Barcelona,
    Jeff

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