Last week I attended Ideas Fest.

I'll say this up front: it's one of the best-organised startup events I've been to. Great speakers, great people in the room, a different energy to the usual conference circuit. If you're a founder and you haven't been, go.

But something struck me while I was there.

I talked to founder after founder, from our community and beyond. A lot of them are lost. Not in the sense that they don't know what they're doing - most of them do. Lost in a different way. Lost in a sea of conflicting information coming at them from every direction, all at once.

This isn't a criticism of anyone. Not the founders. Not the speakers. Not the conference. Everyone there was doing their best. It's structural. The world is noisy. Entrepreneurship has no textbook. Every day a founder faces a problem they've never faced before. So they go looking for advice, hoping for the shortcut that skips the pitfall.

That search for a shortcut is exactly where the trap is.

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Someone gets on stage, talks about their experience, offers advice on marketing, insurance, legal structure, whatever. Stop and think about it. The person talking about marketing strategy usually runs a marketing business. The person talking about insurance usually sells insurance. That doesn't make what they're saying false. It makes it worth asking: what's this person's incentive?

A founder told me a story just before I left Ideas Fest. He'd gone to a talk where someone he genuinely admires was speaking. Someone in the audience asked a simple question: how much runway should you keep in reserve, in case things go wrong?

The speaker said he always keeps about three months of salaries covered, then named the number. £3-4 million.

The founder telling me this got up and left the talk. Not out of anger. He just realised, instantly, that whatever came next had nothing to do with him. This was a room full of early-stage founders. Three to four million in reserve is a number that belongs to a business years down the line, after serious fundraising and serious revenue.

It wasn't bad advice. It was advice from a different world, dressed up as if it applied to everyone in the room.

Then there was the AI talk. Another well-known speaker, ostensibly there to explain how to make money with AI right now. The longer you listened, the clearer it became - the whole thing was a pitch for his own service, wearing a different outfit.

Here's a subtler version of the same trap, and it has nothing to do with anyone lying to you.

Talk to someone from a marketing agency and they'll tell you social media is essential. Talk to a lawyer and they'll tell you your contracts need to be watertight before you do anything else. They might both be completely right, from where they're standing.

But there's a difference between important and critical, and only someone with a view of your whole business can tell you which one you're dealing with. The marketing specialist sees the world through marketing. The lawyer sees it through contracts. There's an actual name for this - the law of the instrument. Give someone a hammer, and every problem starts to look like a nail.

Social media might genuinely matter for your business one day. It might not be critical right now, while you're still trying to find product-market fit. Solid legal documents might matter enormously - or a cheap and fast version might be perfectly fine until you have the money to do it properly. A specialist can tell you their piece is important. Only someone with the full picture, at your exact stage, can tell you where it actually ranks.

The speakers who genuinely aren't selling anything, who are just sharing what worked for them - even there, there's a problem. And it's not about honesty at all.

Survivorship bias. During World War Two, engineers studying which parts of returning planes to reinforce with armour looked at the bullet holes on the planes that made it back. The obvious move was to armour those exact spots. Someone had to point out the flaw: those planes survived despite being hit there. The planes hit somewhere else never made it back to be studied.

Founder advice works the same way. The person on stage is telling you a true story about the one path that happened to survive. You don't see everyone who tried something similar and didn't make it, or how much luck sat underneath the strategy.

Memory itself edits the story. When someone far ahead of you tells their story, their memory isn't a recording - it's reconstructed, and reconstruction compresses things. There's even a documented tendency called rosy retrospection, where people remember their own past more favourably than they rated it while living through it. A founder ten years ahead isn't hiding anything. Their own mind already did the editing.

The narrative fallacy. Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman wrote about the same thing: we naturally turn our own past into a simple, causal story, and those stories always give more credit to talent and intention than to luck. When someone explains why their business worked, they believe what they're telling you. But the story has usually written out the moment they met the right investor at the right party, or launched three months before the market shifted their way.

Put those three things together, and something interesting falls out. The further ahead someone is, the more time their story has had to get compressed, smoothed, and edited by their own memory. A founder telling you about something that happened ten years ago is handing you a heavily edited summary, however honest they're being. A founder telling you about something that happened eighteen months ago hasn't had time to forget the hard parts yet.

That's a big part of why peer advice, from someone a few steps ahead rather than a mile ahead, tends to be more reliable. Their situation is closer to yours. But more importantly, their memory of it is closer to the truth, simply because less time has passed for their brain to edit it into something tidier than it actually was.

I learned this the hard way. A few years ago someone gave me feedback on something I was working on, and I didn't take it. I was insulted, honestly. I remember thinking: who are you to tell me this won't work? You don't understand what I'm going through.

Six months later, everything he'd said turned out to be exactly right.

That person was Chris Howard, who's been supporting me and other founders for years. Chris has been more right than wrong, consistently. First, he has nothing to gain from telling me - he's not selling me any services, he can just be honest. Second, he's genuinely a few steps ahead: a serial entrepreneur close to me in age, who built his businesses in a world not that different from the one I'm building in. His experience actually maps onto mine, and it's recent enough that it hasn't been smoothed into a legend yet.

Here's the harder truth. Even when advice is good, your ego still gets in the way. When a peer tells us something, we brush it off - too close, too familiar, what do they know. When a famous stranger says the exact same thing, we treat it like scripture. But the odds it actually applies to your situation, and reflects what really happened rather than a polished version, are almost always higher with the peer.

I had a conversation at Ideas Fest with a founder I'd put in my own definition of successful - not SaaS, not AI, not tech at all. A logistics business. Physical products, warehouses, operations. About a million pounds turnover, eighteen months in.

He doesn't have all the answers either. Nobody does. But what struck me was how he handled input. He acknowledged advice without jumping to act on every piece of it. He came to Ideas Fest with one specific goal - one company he needed to talk to - walked around, enjoyed the event, and left having got exactly that. Nothing more, nothing less.

That's the skill. Not gathering more advice. Learning to say no to most of it.

This matters more now than ever. We're in the AI era, where the volume of content and advice makes it feel like we're constantly behind. But building still takes time. The founders who hold up best aren't the ones consuming the most advice. They're the ones who've learned to filter the noise: the people trying to take a piece of your time, your energy, your focus, often with the best intentions in the world.

It's not about ignoring people. It's about knowing whose voice actually belongs in the room with you, and how much time has passed since they lived the story they're telling you.

✅ Know a founder collecting advice from every talk, podcast and famous voice they can find - while feeling more lost, not less? Forward this their way. The real skill isn't finding more advice. It's learning whose voice actually belongs in the room with them.

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