I find myself dis­en­chanted with what you might call “tra­di­tional” busi­ness cul­ture lately. Now you, a savvy Inter­webz reader, may be the sort of per­son who lives on a Coast near a Val­ley or in a town with a Nee­dle, the kind of town with lots of peo­ple and loads of young up-​​and-​​coming goa­teed cre­atives and stuff. Liv­ing as I do in the mid­dle of fly­over coun­try, I’m not sure “tra­di­tional busi­ness” means for you what it does here: lots of golf, inor­di­nate strid­ing, break­fast net­work­ing meet­ings, call­ing impor­tant peo­ple by their first names, and—the kicker, for me—a ten­dency to assume that peo­ple who made money in the last busi­ness cycle, or the one before that, or one a Long Long Time Ago, that those peo­ple are rich now because they are good busi­ness­men.

This is the kind of self-​​reinforcing unex­am­ined mythol­ogy that leads young entre­pre­neurs to their doom. You get an eco­nomic devel­op­ment infra­struc­ture in place, you get boards and angel and VC investors all used to what they’re used to and stand­ing by the claim that “busi­ness is always essen­tially the same no mat­ter what the domain.” They set up boot camps and train­ing sem­i­nars and they arrange these net­work­ing lunches and earnest young peo­ple in black suits or khakis show up and eat slices of pizza (at Tech Startup Events) or hors d’oeuvres (at Future Of Our Region Events), and they lis­ten to that crap.

When I invest in a com­pany, it’s the team I’m look­ing at. And by that I mean: I want to see some­body who reminds me of me when I was a kid.

When I hear an pitch, I need to under­stand it in the time the ele­va­tor door takes to open. And by that I mean: (a) we live in a town with strin­gent “human-​​scale” build­ing height restric­tions, so (b) you can tell we’re pretty fuck­ing provin­cial so use only a few small words I’ve known since I was on the foot­ball team.

When you’re get­ting ready to launch, you need to get your busi­ness plan ready and make a con­vinc­ing case for your mar­ket and your prospects over the next five years. And by that I mean: nobody ever reads the damned things, but at least we know we can tell you what to do and expect you to lis­ten to your bet­ters, sonny boy.

When you’re try­ing to raise seri­ous money, you need some­body in charge of the firm who’s famil­iar with the lan­guage of busi­ness, of mar­ket­ing, and the cul­ture of star­tups. And by that I mean: When some­body pay­ing more atten­tion than me tells me you have a clue, I’ll stiff you with some tried-​​and-​​true club buddy of mine and you’ll fuck­ing do what he says if you know what’s good for you.

And so forth.

Of course, I know you don’t live in this imag­i­nary town I do. These are all straw man exag­ger­a­tions. I’m just resort­ing to hyper­bole to stage my own pitch. Right?

You betcha.

That said, and straw­men aside: I think smart peo­ple are actu­ally smart, and that dumb peo­ple mess up new businesses.

There’s a sign on the admin­is­tra­tion view of every web­site I’ve run for ten years. It’s on my laptop’s desk­top, too. It’s a reminder to me, as a man­ager and a med­dler and a plan­ner and a guy who’s try­ing to help and at the same time make a buck. Every one of these reminders says the same thing: This doesn’t work the way you think it does.

The biggest dan­ger, in my mind, to a per­son start­ing a business—whether it’s some hare-​​brained entre­pre­neur­ial thing, or a non­profit, or a “lifestyle” busi­ness (a term I despise)—is tak­ing advice from peo­ple who assume they suc­ceeded because of what they did.

The core of my advice to folks want­ing to found a busi­ness is sim­ple enough to pass along here: lis­ten to “coaches” and “boot­camps” and eco­nomic devel­op­ment peo­ple only enough to con­vince them you respect them, and to learn what they expect so you can use that to your advan­tage, but don’t let them fuck with your money or ideas.

Notice I didn’t say stay away from them: I said be nice, try to really lis­ten, do your best to learn, and along the way do the min­i­mum amount nec­es­sary to ingra­ti­ate your­selves to them. If you can’t do those things, you actu­ally do need a “peo­ple per­son” around, because it’s all about risk ame­lio­ra­tion, not finan­cial returns. Because you’re doing this to min­i­mize the dis­rup­tive influ­ence of their received wis­dom.

Here’s why: These peo­ple suc­ceeded by chance. Quirks of fate. They hap­pened to sell off their com­pa­nies or exe­cute some other exit strat­egy just before some ran­dom eco­nomic down­turn. They had rich rel­a­tives. They hap­pened to be in the room when some dude wanted to invest in a startup. They had a smart admin­is­tra­tor who kept them out of the research wing. They were mid­dle man­agers in some global giant fuck­ing firm and (more’s a pity) never heard a real human idea in their lives, and now they think they can tell you how to run your busi­ness. They go to meet­ings with their own clones and nod and shout Hal­lelu­jah when­ever some­body utters a mantra about “invest in the team” or “busi­ness savvy” or “demo­graphic tar­get­ing”. They not only imag­ine, they will say out­right that every busi­ness is essen­tially the same, and that what mat­ters is mak­ing the right mys­ti­cal passes in the right order and also run­ning it by your guts.

Bull­shit. These peo­ple are human beings.

That said, they’re the small frac­tion of human beings who have the god­damned money. It’s not your cus­tomers who are going to make your new idea into a com­pany, Startup Grrrl: it’s those fools with all the money.

Let me be as pre­cise as I can be: human beings are stu­pid. You are too, by the way. But they are moreso, because they’ve had suc­cess after nav­i­gat­ing an uncer­tain course through the rat­maze to their per­ceived cheesy Win­ning State. And when that hap­pens, our intrin­sic human men­tal wiring kicks in and all of a sud­den they’re doing pattern-​​recognition on scant data. They’re super­sti­tious. They are poor at mod­el­ing. They suck at gen­er­al­iz­ing, and for the most part their cul­ture is founded on prin­ci­ples of rein­forc­ing their notions.

[Like yours is, and mine is… but leave that for another day.]

Risk, reward, rein­force­ment. So strong, they don’t even have to repeat it to get it engrained; they just play off one another.

This doesn’t work the way they think it does.

Here’s what I think, instead.

Save your money, if you can, and don’t burn it at the altar of the priests in black turtle­necks and sports coats. Hang out with the ones you can, as stated above, but don’t waste money. Don’t risk your money or your time on them.

Instead, find five other star­tups. Seriously.

Form a Guild. Form an asso­ci­a­tion that lets you each do what you want, spread the work around, sup­port one another. Form a com­mu­nity of 30 peo­ple, not three, that can demand the atten­tion (when needed) of one rare but actu­ally use­ful busi­ness advi­sor at a time, and aggre­gate your risks across all your firms, and kick the bas­tards out when you’re done with them.

Coach each other.

I believe smart peo­ple, peo­ple with ideas like you have, are actu­ally smart. And I think peo­ple with new ideas are more likely to under­stand the one true thing I plas­ter all over my own sen­so­rium: This doesn’t work the way you think it does. This doesn’t work the way they tell you it does. This doesn’t work by for­mula, by super­sti­tion, by the novel appli­ca­tion of pat anec­do­tal hand-​​waving or rit­u­al­ized net­work­ing or in-​​group mar­ket­ing to peo­ple who can’t bother to learn the dif­fer­ence between a social net­work and a web­site before telling you how to run your company.

There is no heuristic.

What you need is advice on how to fill out forms. Names of peo­ple who give out money, and what they expect. Exam­ples, hard and fac­tual, of busi­ness plans that have actu­ally been fol­lowed. Access to peo­ple who are run­ning busi­nesses like yours, and right now.

What you don’t need is pab­u­lum. You don’t need obfus­ca­tion, a gate­keeper who will let you get access to the peo­ple they con­vince you will help, or who wants to dab­ble and sees your idea as a good start­ing point. You don’t need peo­ple who are a bad match for your cul­ture; any ass­hole who tries to change that cul­ture you have now, no mat­ter how much a n00b you think you are, with­out first con­vinc­ing you before­hand that there are mea­sur­able returns and you can undo the changes if things go wrong? They gonna fuck you up.

Hell, you don’t need any­body at all whose advice doesn’t come with a war­ranty and a money-​​back fuck-​​off clause that kicks in when they give you bad advice backed by mis­lead­ing credentials.

In other words: Sure, you need exper­tise you don’t have, but treat your “advi­sors” the same way you would treat your accoun­tant: pro­tect your­self from stu­pid people.

Any human being is as good as another, when it comes to com­mon sense. Unless they’ve pre­sumed they are win­ners because they did some­thing a long time ago, under com­pletely dif­fer­ent circumstances.

When that’s the case, they’re a liability.

Fur­ther: If you want a good exam­ple of how eco­nomic devel­op­ment pro­fes­sion­als can under­mine per­fectly func­tional ideas and busi­ness mod­els by just not know­ing what the words mean, have a look at this.