"What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?"

When Henry Peck threw us that curveball at LSI Asia panel three months ago, I had multiple answers ready—but I gave him the framework instead.

Here's the story I didn't tell:

An accelerator mentor told us to pivot to consumer. "It's faster to revenue," they said. Their logic was simple: consumer moves quick, healthcare moves slow, and we needed traction for demo day.

They were experienced. Well-meaning. And completely wrong for us.

We spent three to four months chasing it. Rebuilt features. Ran customer interviews. Then reality hit: consumer meant price sensitivity we couldn't solve, scale we couldn't afford, and a marketing budget we didn't have. We'd found strong problem-solution fit in healthcare. Consumer was someone else's playbook running on someone else's timeline.

The advisor had never run a deep tech company. They were optimizing for their KPI—quick revenue wins for the cohort—not our long-term velocity. The advice wasn't malicious. It was just misaligned.

That's the trap. When you're a startup, advice is everywhere. Advisors line up to help. The trick isn't finding smart people—smart people are everywhere. It's filtering for judgment you can trust and incentives that actually align with yours before bad advice costs you months of momentum.

Part 1: How to Tell the Difference Before It Hurts

Why advice is everywhere but good advisors are rare

Everyone wants to give you advice. Not everyone is qualified to do so.

The issue isn't intelligence—it's context. Most advisors generalize from their own wins without mapping them to your constraints. They bring pattern-matching from different markets, buyer types, price points, or regulatory worlds, then hand you tactics that worked there and assume they'll work here.

They're not lying. They're just not filtering their experience through your reality.

After working with multiple accelerators and their mentors, and building our own advisory board, we've seen patterns that help us separate signal from noise. It comes down to two differences between good and bad advisors: why they're working with you, and how they do their work.

The two differences that matter

First: their reason for working with you.

The best advisors work with you because they believe in what you're building. They want to be part of the ride, experiencing it alongside you. Because they're sought after, they're selective about who they work with.

The bad ones? They're in it for themselves—either for compensation or for ego. It's purely psychological to feel empowered when giving advice. If you get this feeling from an advisor, run.

Second: how they do their work.

The best advisors we've had showed us what they could do without asking for anything in return. Intros. Connections. Helping us clarify strategy and milestones. Filling knowledge gaps.

The worst ones started by talking about themselves—how amazing they are—and asked for a formal deal in the first or second call.

When picking advisors, "Show, Don't Tell" is our golden screening rule.

What good advisors do

They show up with context and listen more than they talk.

They arrive prepared. They've read your deck, understand your stage, and open with sharp, specific questions in the first ten minutes so the conversation starts productive. They're gathering context, finding nuance, customizing their frameworks to your situation.

They offer clarity, not complexity.

They cut through noise with structures and frameworks. I often walk into conversations with one of our best advisors carrying a mess of data. I leave with it neatly arranged in structured boxes.

They respond positively to pushback.

They treat disagreement as a feature, engaging with counterviews to refine assumptions and pressure-test the plan together. They know that founders—being on the ground—always have more context.

They nuance their advice, explain their thought process, and acknowledge what they don't know.

They tailor guidance to your constraints, make tradeoffs explicit, and avoid generic playbooks. The best advisors understand there are rarely single best ways to do things. It's always an optimization problem.

"I would do X because of Y, but you might want to talk to this person because they understand factor Z that might be more relevant when you're making your decision."

They remember it's your company.

The founder's job is to take in multiple data points and make a decision based on their own worldview, with conviction. The best advisors don't mind when you make a call that goes against their personal viewpoint.

They activate their network.

They follow through with timely warm introductions and relevant follow-ups so their calendar and reputation go to work for you.

They price based on outcomes.

They're comfortable tying equity or fees to milestones so "How will we know this worked?" has a clear, measurable answer.

What bad advisors do

They react badly to counterviews.

They turn pushback into a power struggle, prioritizing dominance over dialogue and shutting down learning.

They push "trust me, it works" absolutism.

They insist on my-way-or-the-highway without evidence that fits your stage or context.

They don't listen—they jump straight to advice.

They skip discovery and offer one-size-fits-all tactics that ignore your constraints and reality.

They gatekeep relationships.

They insist on being the bottleneck on intros, valuing control over impact and slowing real progress.

They reframe every problem as their specialty.

We once worked with an advisor whose solution to everything was "hire an experienced CEO with gray hair." Struggling with product-market fit? You need a seasoned CEO. Sales pipeline weak? Bring in someone who's done it before. Burn rate concerns? A gray-haired executive will fix it. When your only lens is leadership replacement, every problem looks like a founder capability gap. Bad advisors make everything fit their narrow expertise, erasing nuance and ignoring what you actually need to solve.

They confuse activity with progress.

They add meetings and syncs that don't move metrics or decisions forward.

They're in it for the ego.

They chase credit and optics while treating your outcomes as secondary.

They're expensive to fire.

They push vague scopes, long vesting, and no cliffs so bad structure locks in bad behavior.

Red flags you can test fast

"I'm very busy—loop me in."

This signals low bandwidth and low accountability. Start with a small, time-bound request and watch whether they actually deliver.

"I'll connect you to X" with no timeline.

Always ask "Great—by when?" Use the follow-through speed to gauge reliability.

"I usually take 1% for advisory."

Only proceed with a specific scope, measurable outcomes, proper vesting, and a real cliff. If clarifying these feels awkward, walk.

"This is what you should do."

Ask them why. Point out issues with their approach. Suggest alternatives. If it leads to a discussion where you learn something—that's a great sign. If it turns into an ego match where you feel unheard—walk.

Structure the relationship to align incentives

One of the challenges when bringing an advisor on board formally is drafting the contract clauses—something startups often mess up. Our best practice is to tie equity to milestones. We use a modified version of FAST to sign advisors.

One narrow mandate.

Hire an advisor for a specific purpose. No generics. No board buffing.

Measurable milestones.

Choose a focused objective like "Close two enterprise pilots in health systems" instead of vague "help with GTM." Define concrete, measurable milestones with numbers. Without this, misaligned expectations are common, and the company stands to lose the most in terms of momentum.

3–4 month cliff.

Build in a graceful exit if fit is poor, with vesting that continues only if the collaboration delivers.

Time-boxed cadence.

Run one monthly working session plus ad-hoc support with a clear action plan so expectations and responsiveness are explicit.

Pay for conversion, not conversation.

Tie equity or cash to outcomes to reveal who leans in when results—not meetings—drive reward.

Part 2: When good advisors give bad advice

Here's the uncomfortable truth: even the best advisors can mislead you.

This is the trap founders fall into most often. We did too. Your advisors are naturally more experienced, better connected, and have seen more companies. So when they give advice, the instinct is to follow it. But experience isn't transferable—context is everything.

One of our best mentors—a CEO with deep regulatory knowledge and a track record we genuinely admired—also pushed us toward consumer. Same advice, different person. But unlike the accelerator mentor, this person understood team dynamics, helped us structure our hiring plan, and guided us through regulatory complexity that would have buried us otherwise.

Great mentor. Wrong advice on go-to-market.

Here's what made it harder: we respected this person. Rejecting their advice felt like rejecting them. It took us weeks to separate the two. That psychological difficulty—the fear of seeming arrogant or ungrateful—is why founders follow bad advice even when their gut screams otherwise.

We realized the consumer pivot would have us build in the opposite direction to our product vision. Yes, it could be faster in the short term. But speed isn't velocity. Velocity has direction. This would have been speed toward the wrong destination.

So we said no. And the mentor? Still one of our best advisors. Because good advisors don't take disagreement personally—they take it as data.

How to evaluate advice without offending advisors you respect

The key is recognizing that advice is always filtered. Data runs through a person's worldview—shaped by their wins, their losses, their biases—and comes out the other side as a recommendation. Your job as a founder isn't to accept or reject the advice. It's to extract the underlying data and run it through your worldview.

We use a simple three-part filter:

Context: How relevant is this to us?

Even strong advisors can mislead when their experience comes from different stages, markets, or constraints. A marketing strategy for consumer doesn't map to enterprise. A go-to-market for wellness doesn't translate to healthtech. A growth playbook from 2019 might not work in 2025.

Ask yourself: Does their win condition match ours? Are the constraints comparable? Is the timeline similar?

If the context is off, the advice might still contain useful principles—but the tactics won't transfer.

Competence: Does this advisor have the right experience to give this specific advice?

This is the hardest filter to apply because it feels like questioning someone's credibility. But competence is domain-specific. A brilliant product advisor might give terrible fundraising advice. A CEO who scaled in SaaS might not understand hardware unit economics.

Our accelerator mentor was competent in fast iteration and scrappy execution. But they'd never navigated deep tech timelines or healthcare sales cycles. The consumer advice wasn't incompetent—it was out of domain.

Ask: Has this person actually done the thing they're advising me to do? In a similar context? Recently enough that the landscape hasn't shifted?

Consensus: How many competent sources share this view?

One data point is an opinion. Three data points is a pattern. Five is a signal you can't ignore.

Gather independent views from people with relevant experience, then compare. Where do they align? Where do they conflict? If three healthcare operators say "enterprise takes 18 months" and one consumer advisor says "move fast," that's not a split decision—that's a consensus with an outlier.

But—and this is critical—consensus doesn't mean truth. It means you should weight it heavily and have a very good reason if you're going against it.

Getting to the Data: Make them show their work

The best way to evaluate advice is to make advisors reveal their assumptions.

When someone gives you a recommendation, probe with clarifying questions:

• "How would this change if our sales cycle were six months longer?"

• "What if our budget were half that size?"

• "I've seen this alternative approach work at another company. What's your take on the tradeoffs?"

Good advisors engage. They refine their advice based on your constraints. They explain their reasoning and acknowledge edge cases. They might even say, "You know what, given that constraint, my original advice doesn't apply."

Bad advisors double down. They treat questions as challenges to their authority instead of opportunities to clarify.

Consensus: Triangulate, then decide

Your advisors are there to help you see blind spots—to look at the same problem through different lenses, from different stakeholders, broken down at different levels. That's the real value.

But the decision is always yours.

Gather the data points. Probe until you understand the underlying assumptions. Then make the call that fits your thesis and your reality.

And remember: choosing not to follow advice isn't rejecting the advisor. It's doing your job as a founder.