Brian recalls the famous line by Paul Graham: "Startups are like sharks; if they stop swimming, they die."
He continues, "If you're pre-product-market fit, the best advice I can offer from that period is that action produces information, so just keep doing stuff." He advises founders that even if they are unsure of their next steps, they should do anything to gather information about their customers and the product.
"This was certainly true for me. There were times when we just did something instead of endlessly debating it. The moment we shipped it, we knew we had built it wrong, but now we had an idea of what to do next." The lesson here is to move quickly—speed is the number one advantage of a startup.
That said, Brian explains that most people in life including many founders have a hard time producing information because they are "afraid to take steps into the unknown. But to reach the top of the mountain, you must take the first three steps so that the next three steps will be revealed to you."
"That's what separates entrepreneurial individuals—their comfort with risk."
He concludes by saying that people often overestimate the risk of starting a business and encourages them to launch their own companies. "You can raise a seed round, pay yourself a salary, try for two years, and if it doesn't work out, go get another job. If you start a startup and it fails, you become even more valuable to your next employer."
Video source: Advice for startups | Brian Armstrong and Lex Fridman
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Alliance’s ALL13 cohort is open for applications
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