Building a business is really hard. At every instance, information pours in from people trying to convince you to do things you may not want to do. Why not spend money on advertising? Why not raise a bunch of VC money right now? Why not take a meeting with everyone under the sun who is visiting your city to catch up?
For many founders, this deluge of information might seem new. For a former VC however, it's not.
VC is all about learning to say no. Over the course of a year, several thousand companies will try to get your attention, and it's your job to find the 1-2 deals you want to do. People are constantly pitching you and the only way to succeed is to build a certain level of healthy skepticism.
People, especially my friends and family, used to make fun of me for how skeptical I’d be when I heard new information. At times, I was probably too critical. Now, as ‘information’ starts pouring in from every nook and cranny of the internet, only later to be debunked, I’m starting to double down on becoming hypercritical.
In a world gone mad with information, I believe we should only really only trust our friends, family, and people in “sell free” zones.
The reason to only trust your friends and family is that these are the only people who have lived experiences you have observed closely for an extended period of time. If one of my friends started looking a lot better, or seemed more relaxed over time, perhaps it would then be worth trying some of the interventions they made in their diet, nutrition, and lifestyle. If my grandmother, at age 80, has more vitality than I currently do (hint, she does), it may be worth understanding what about her lifestyle allowed her to live that way.
The challenge then is how to deal with complex situations, like healthcare or finances? My line in the sand is this: I am open to trusting doctors and other types of professionals, but more so when incentives are aligned, i.e., they are not trying to sell me something. For example, I trust the NHS in England primarily because I don’t have to pay them after every visit. Since they have a weaker incentive to sell me things than say, doctors in the US, it seems like they are more likely to dispense unbiased information, information that I am more willing to trust. Lets call the NHS an example of a concept I’d like to call a sell free zone.
Everyone’s trying to sell you something (even us substack’ers), but friends, family, and people in sell free zones are usually not, making them inherently more trustable.
While we’re all generally stuck with our family from birth, I’m excited about expanding friendships in adulthood, particularly by building more IRL communities where true friendships can flourish. As I’ve written about in the past, subscription networks business models could enable more sell free zones (albeit for a smaller subset of paying subscribers) that don’t rely on advertising. These networks might be smaller in nature than the current tech companies, but at the same time there may be more of them. Surely this is good thing if it means we’ll make more friends, get sold less stuff, and be able to trust one another a little bit more.
You're right to call out information that is distorted by weird incentives. Influencers in social media. Areas of the US healthcare system. Hyperbolic news to drive engagement which is how the media model works. Agree that it's also wild how this phenomenon, or whatever it is, seems to have exponentially grown over the past few years.