Are Best Practices Best?
I often hear people working on startups mention “best practices.” I have always wondered—what makes something a best practice? Who determined it was best?
YCombinator (YC) is one of the world’s most influential startup investors. They’ve seeded numerous now-public companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Instacart, and many more.
Some of their most popular advice for founders: launch early, raise as little money as possible, and always talk to customers.
Would those count as best practices? Surely!
Sam Altman ran YC for five years. He helped create a number of those teachings. He left YC in 2019 to found OpenAI.
OpenAI did not launch any products for three years. OpenAI raised hundreds of millions of dollars before having a product. And OpenAI never really spoke with customers.
Now, OpenAI might be the fastest-growing startup in the history of the world.
So what are the best practices?
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Let’s try another approach to see if we can find the best practices.
What do Apple, the Victorian Era British Empire, Toy Story, the 1960s Boston Celtics, Notch from Minecraft, IKEA, Usain Bolt, and many others have in common?
They won! They achieved the highest possible outcome in their domain.
What do they not have in common?
Basically everything else.
So what is the lesson?
If you want to become more effective, you should just prioritize accomplishing the stuff you want to accomplish. How you manage to do that is completely up to you and likely depends on the nuances of your situation. Ignore the rest. It’s mainly marketing (and people giving bad advice).
So what advice do you have?
Any practice can be a best practice as long as you are right.
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