Lehman: External experts and investors cannot solve a startup's hardest problems
Tom Lehman · a16z Podcast | Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs · Jan 2, 2019 · at 20:21
Tom Lehman, co-founder of Genius, explains why founders must solve their core challenges themselves rather than expecting external advisors or VC partners to provide solutions.
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“Whenever we had a hard problem and we went into a meeting with a lawyer or an investor or a YC partner or some kind of expert thinking, this is the meeting where someone's going to tell us like what to do. And it's so great that we have access to this. It just doesn't happen. And the reason Is that A, the idiosyncrasies of your situation are more relevant than you think. Like, you can'truly describe your whole situation in like an hour or something. Like, it's, you know, a lot more idiosyncratic stuff than you think. Which is also related to Le Corbusier, by the way. Like, the criticism of Le Corbusier is there's so much idiosyncratic, on-the-ground social life going on in cities that you can't just take the expert of, anyway, so there's a lot of stuff, you know, and the expert doesn't care as much as you, probably. And so you need to combine those two things, your superior knowledge and your superior amount of caring, And figure it out yourself, and not look for the mythical expert who's gonna get you out of your hard problem.”
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