The Advice Everyone Gives Founders That Is Quietly Wrong

At some point in the last twenty years, I stopped counting how many times I’ve been told to focus.

Focus on one market. Focus on one product. Focus on one channel. Say no to everything that isn’t your core. The advice is delivered with great confidence, usually by people who have either built something successfully by following it or read about someone who did. It has the ring of wisdom. It sounds like the kind of thing a serious person says. And for a certain kind of business, at a certain stage, it’s probably right.

It’s also, if applied too rigidly and for too long, the reason a lot of businesses stop growing.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not arguing against focus as a concept. In the early years of Ergode, focus was survival. We had limited capital, limited people, and a very finite amount of my own attention. Trying to do too many things at once would have killed the business before it had a chance to find its footing. I understand why the advice exists and why it gets repeated. The problem is that it gets repeated well past the point where it’s useful, and founders who follow it too faithfully can find themselves in a very focused, very stagnant business and wondering why discipline isn’t working.

There’s a version of focus that is strategy. And there’s a version of focus that is fear dressed up as discipline. From the inside, they can look nearly identical.

This isn’t the only piece of standard founder advice I’ve grown sceptical of over the years. There’s another one that I find even more pervasive, and in some ways more damaging: the idea that you should always hire for culture fit.

It sounds reasonable. You want people who share your values, who get along with each other, who feel like they belong in the room. Nobody is going to argue against that in principle. But in practice, “culture fit” has a way of becoming a polite shorthand for “people who think like me and won’t make me uncomfortable.” And a team full of people who won’t make you uncomfortable is a team that will consistently confirm your existing thinking, avoid the conversations that need to happen, and gently reinforce whatever blind spots you brought into the business in the first place.

Some of the most valuable people I’ve worked with over the years were, at the point of hiring, not an obvious culture fit. They asked questions that felt slightly impertinent. They pushed back on things I thought were settled. They came from backgrounds different enough from mine that they approached problems from angles I wouldn’t have considered. The friction was occasionally irritating and frequently useful. The version of Ergode built only from people who fit naturally into how I thought would be a smaller and less interesting business than the one we actually built.

Culture fit matters. But culture add matters more. The distinction sounds like semantics. It isn’t.

Then there’s the advice that gets delivered to almost every founder at some point, usually by someone who means well: that you need to separate yourself from the business emotionally. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you. Keep a professional distance from the outcomes. This is presented as maturity, as the mark of a serious operator rather than a passionate but naive founder.

I’ve tried this. I’ve tried it sincerely. And what I’ve found is that the founders who genuinely don’t take their business personally tend to produce businesses that nobody else takes personally either. Some degree of emotional investment isn’t a weakness in a founder. It’s the thing that keeps you in the room when the sensible decision would be to leave. It’s what makes you care enough about the details to notice when something is wrong. The goal isn’t emotional detachment. The goal is emotional intelligence — knowing when your feelings are giving you useful information and when they’re distorting your judgement. That’s a much harder skill to develop than simply being told not to care.

The advice that perhaps frustrates me most, though, is the one delivered most confidently: that you should trust your gut. Follow your instincts. Back yourself.

I believe in instinct. I’ve made decisions on instinct that turned out well and I’m glad I made them. But I’ve also made decisions on instinct that were simply wrong, and what I was actually following in those moments wasn’t deep entrepreneurial intuition — it was familiarity, or stubbornness, or the discomfort of sitting with uncertainty long enough to let proper thinking catch up. Instinct built from twenty years of pattern recognition is a real asset. Instinct as a substitute for analysis, or as a reason to avoid a difficult conversation, or as permission to ignore evidence that contradicts what you want to believe — that’s just confirmation bias with better branding.

The common thread in all of this, I think, is that most founder advice was built for a specific context and has been generalised far beyond it. Focus is right at certain stages. Culture fit matters to a degree. Emotional distance has its uses. Instinct is valuable when calibrated. None of it is wrong exactly. All of it becomes wrong when treated as permanent, universal truth rather than as a tool with a particular application.

The best thing I’ve learned to do with advice — including, I suppose, this — is ask when it’s true rather than whether it’s true. The answer to that question is almost always more useful.

Regards,
Rupesh