Ten pieces of advice for new founders, each from someone who has actually built and run a company through the kind of conditions most first-time founders are about to encounter. The filter applied: the person had to have shipped a real business that produced real revenue (not just a fund, not just a podcast), and the advice had to be specific enough to act on this week.
The articles in this genre usually skew toward the same five household names — Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Branson, the one or two founder-CEOs whose quotes are most over-circulated. This list deliberately mixes in operators whose advice is less recycled, including a few non-American founders and a few who built quietly profitable businesses without ever raising venture capital. The aim is breadth: the lessons that come from a Y Combinator-backed software founder are different from the lessons of a service-business operator who hit eight figures bootstrapped, and a new founder benefits from hearing both.
Where the source is verifiable — a published essay, an interview, a book — that's noted. Where it's a widely-attributed paraphrase, that's noted too. None of the quotes below are invented.
1. Paul Graham — "Make something people want"
This has been the Y Combinator motto since 2005, and Graham has spent two decades elaborating on why it remains the only piece of startup advice that matters more than the others. The trap, especially for technical founders, is to build something clever first and then look for someone to want it. The pattern that works is the reverse: spend the early weeks talking to a small number of specific people about a specific problem, then build only what they'd pay for.
The corollary Graham has emphasised more recently — "it's much better to make something a small number of users love than a large number of users like" — is the one most first-time founders miss. The first version of a successful product almost always has a tiny, intensely enthusiastic user base. Scaling to many users who feel mildly positive is the harder failure mode to recover from.
Best for: first-time founders trying to decide what to build.
2. Sam Altman — "Be relentlessly resourceful"
Altman has identified this — quoting Paul Graham — as the single piece of startup advice he wishes more founders took to heart. Resourcefulness in his framing is not about working harder; it's about refusing to accept "there's no way to solve this" as a final answer. The founders he's described as the strongest performers are the ones who, when a door closes, immediately start looking for a window, a side entrance, a way to climb in through the basement.
The practical version: when you hit an obstacle that seems insurmountable, set a timer for thirty minutes and write down every conceivable angle of attack. The first ten will be obvious. The eleventh through the twentieth often contain the move that works. Most founders stop at three.
Best for: founders who hit a wall and assume it's permanent.
3. Ben Horowitz — "There are no silver bullets, just lead bullets"
The Horowitz essay this comes from describes the moment at Opsware when the team was looking for the single product feature, marketing campaign, or partnership that would save the company. There wasn't one. What saved the company was the willingness to rebuild the product, rehire half the sales team, and grind out the next six months of fundamental work. The lead-bullet metaphor — slower, less glamorous, what actually wins fights — has stayed in circulation because it keeps being right.
The advice for new founders is the inverse of most startup content: stop looking for the hack, the growth lever, the viral mechanic. The companies that survive the early years usually survive because the founders did the unglamorous version of the work — customer support, slow product improvement, careful hiring — for longer than the competition.
Best for: founders who have just spent a week searching for the one trick.
4. Reid Hoffman — "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late"
The LinkedIn founder's most-cited line has been twisted in both directions — used to justify shipping garbage, and used to justify polishing forever. The honest interpretation is in the middle: launch when the core promise of the product is barely working, before you've added the secondary features you imagine users will want. Then learn from real users what those secondary features should actually be, instead of guessing.
The version Hoffman has reiterated in recent interviews adds nuance: in some categories (security, healthcare, anything regulated), the bar for the embarrassing-first-version is higher. The principle holds — ship early — but the floor below which you can't go varies by what your product does to people.
Best for: founders who've been building in stealth for nine months.
5. Jason Fried — "Plans are guesses"
The Basecamp/37signals co-founder has written and rewritten this argument for two decades. The five-year plan is fiction; the one-year plan is mostly fiction; the quarterly plan is the longest planning horizon a small company should treat as load-bearing. Fried's broader point is that the elaborate strategic planning that large companies inherit from McKinsey-style consulting is mostly performance — and that small companies that mimic it are wasting the agility advantage that's their main weapon.
The shorter operating cadence Fried advocates — six-week cycles at Basecamp, two-week cycles at many startups — is the practical alternative. Plan what you'll do for the next six weeks. Do it. Reassess. The next six weeks might look completely different. That's fine.
Best for: founders whose business plan is starting to feel like a homework assignment.
6. Sara Blakely — "Embarrass yourself daily"
The Spanx founder has talked extensively about her father's nightly dinner-table question when she was growing up: "What did you fail at today?" The expected answer was something specific. The implication was that the absence of failure meant the absence of risk-taking. Blakely has credited this framing with her willingness — through years of being told women's shapewear was a niche category — to keep pitching, keep cold-calling, keep showing up at department stores when she was being ignored.
For new founders, the operational version is simple: identify the thing you've been avoiding because it's uncomfortable (the difficult customer email, the pricing increase, the cold pitch to a high-status target), and do it this week. The growth happens on the other side of the discomfort, not in the planning around it.
Best for: founders who've been "preparing" to do something hard for over a month.
7. Marc Andreessen — "The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit"
The 2007 essay this is from remains one of the most useful diagnostics in startup writing. Andreessen's framing: before product-market fit, nothing else matters — not your team, not your fundraising, not your competition. After product-market fit, you can correct almost any other mistake. The job of the early-stage founder is to recognise when you've found it (the market starts pulling the product out of your hands), and to be ruthlessly focused on getting there.
The mistake first-time founders make is to confuse activity for fit. Hiring a marketing person, opening a sales office, doing PR — these are responses to fit, not paths to it. Until customers start coming to you faster than you can build for them, the work is still about finding the product that creates that pull.
Best for: founders deciding whether they're ready to scale, or still in the search phase.
8. Melanie Perkins — "If you can't get the experts, find the apprentices"
The Canva co-founder has described the early years when nobody senior in the industry would join — investors had passed, designers were skeptical, and the entire ecosystem treated the idea of "design software for non-designers" as a non-starter. Perkins' response was to recruit junior people with raw talent and high potential, then build the company around developing them rather than waiting for the perfect senior hire who wasn't coming.
The principle generalises. The seasoned VP you want to hire usually won't join a six-person company; the smart 24-year-old who'd be a VP in five years will, and the equity math means they'll be more aligned with the outcome. Early-stage founders who optimise for raw talent and growth trajectory tend to build stronger teams than those who try to recruit the resume they'd hire at Series C.
Best for: early founders frustrated that nobody senior wants to join.
9. Brian Chesky — "Do things that don't scale"
The Airbnb co-founder, building on Graham's essay of the same name, has talked frequently about the early years when he and Joe Gebbia personally photographed every host's apartment in New York to fix the listing quality problem. It didn't scale. It wasn't supposed to. What it did was create the early data that made automated approaches eventually possible — and it taught the founders things about the product that no analytics dashboard would have surfaced.
The lesson for new founders is to resist the urge to automate, scale, or template too early. The early hand-crafted version of customer onboarding, product setup, or community management is doing a kind of learning that the scaled version can't do. The right time to systematise is after you've done the manual version often enough to know which parts to systematise.
Best for: founders who feel like they're "doing things that won't scale" and worry about it.
10. Naval Ravikant — "Play long-term games with long-term people"
The AngelList founder has built a body of writing around the idea that compounding is the central wealth-creation mechanism — financially, in skills, and in relationships. The advice for founders: the people you work with in your first venture are probably the people you'll work with in your second, third, and fourth. The reputation you build in the first decade is the asset you trade on for the rest of your career.
This argues for behaviour that looks costly in the short run and is wildly underpriced in the long run: don't burn investors, even ones who pass on you. Don't burn employees, even ones who didn't work out. Don't burn customers, even ones who churned. The startup world is much smaller than it appears in the first year, and the founders who behave well through hard moments build a quiet network of people who will fund, hire, and refer to them for the next thirty years.
Best for: founders weighing a short-term win against a long-term relationship cost.
What to take from this
Ten voices, ten angles. The unifying thread, if there is one, is that none of the advice above is original. The principles have been repeated by serious operators across decades because they happen to be true, and because each generation of new founders has to discover them again in their own context. The best move you can make this week is to pick the one that maps to the situation you're actually in, and act on it. The other nine will still be there when you need them.
For more in this vein, the 8 best pieces of life-changing advice from successful entrepreneurs covers the foundational lessons most experienced founders converge on, and the 100 quotes from successful entrepreneurs is the longer curated set. For the harder, less-discussed side of founder life — the parts the conference circuit avoids — the scary truths of being an entrepreneur is the honest counterweight.
The full archive of founder writing and business books lives in the Entrepreneurship topic page.
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