Startup advice doesn't work

The strangest thing about startup advice is that either it doesn't seem to work, or people don't read it. If it worked and people read it, good startups would be more and more common. But they're not. I haven't run the numbers, but no investor I've ever met has told me that startups succeed more often now than before.

Most things aren't like startups, and it'd be terrible if they were. If the lessons from civil engineering didn't hold from one building to the next, we wouldn't have anywhere to live.

And yet, people do seem to read startup advice or, at least, want it enough that there are endless books and companies and universities dedicated to giving it. I've even given a lot of it myself over the years, whether people wanted me to or not. I think the conclusion, therefore, has to be that startup advice just doesn't work.