7 Forms of Entrepreneurship Advice to Avoid From Thanksgiving Weekend

by Larry Chiang

Thanksgiving is a time of default networking. You are forced to network with family because you’re all around a table. This causes default mentorship. This also causes the worst form of vice to occur: Free advice.

I am a victim of being a Motivational Listener. Sure, I sit First Chair Entrepreneurship at a prestigious school and take notes like a fiend. When it comes to listening to half-baked entrepreneurship advice, I am the undisputed Silicon Valley leader with over 40 confirmed and fully curated “Signature business recipes”. Think of these business recipes as a set of protocols where I go in and reverse engineer the protocols. Think of signature business recipes as taking advice and breaking it down into details so we can execute.

Lets break down the 7 Forms of Entrepreneurship Advice to avoid from Thanksgiving weekend

-1- “Do what I say, not what I did.”

Successful people at Thanksgiving take two hours to look in the rear view mirror. Make no mistake, these are the only two hours they spend. I have a theory that during forced vacation, successful people look back and self criticize. During that frame of mind, they will coach to do what they say.

My mode of listening is to pay attention to what they did BUT DID NOT STRESS. Let me repeat, let them talk about themselves but focus on what they did to startup. Not what they say to do. The difference is huge. The difference is that the pattern of starting up can and probably will, help you. They probably muddled around, spun their wheels and did things that didn’t exactly scale.

Conclusion: Do what successful people did when they were starting. Everything outside of the first 17 steps really is just gossip and urban legend. What they’re saying to do should be curated between two categories: Starting up advice and tweeking the settings of something that already is up and going.

-2- Avoid coaching from the “Accidental Entrepreneur.”

I argue that nearly half of founders are accidental entrepreneurs. So if you’re at Thanksgiving with a 28 time lottery winner… know that youre in the presence of a person who had 28 career inflection points because of luck. When I say ’28 time lottery winner’, I mean that is what the pattern “Accidental Entrepreneur” is.

Conclusion: When an accidental entrepreneur starts to pontificate…, download my curated tweets, “#purposefulAE”. It stands for purposeful accidental entrepreneur.

-3- You don’t need to code.

You *do* need to code. You can’t delegate it. You cannot hire out for people that code for you for equity.
Conclusion: learn to code.

-4- “You-need-money-to-make-money” advice is to be avoided at all costs.

You have not needed money to make money since the #WrightBros. The Wright Brothers invented airplanes by using profits from selling bikes. The Wright Brothers did not need venture capital.

Conclusion: Study ‘signature business recipes from 1983’. Those 1983, Mark McCormack recipes do not need money.

-5- Start at the bottom somewhere and work your way up.

Google what an #ExternalAPI is. Working your way up from the mailroom does not work anymore. Now, it is working your way up from being the cold calling CS major who also knows how to code.

Conclusion: Learn and execute #csMajorCRO. Computer science major, Chief Revenue Officer.

-6- It’s not that painful

After severe birthing-a-company-pain, that pain is forgotten. Google “Do Things That Don’t Scale But have momentum”