I’ve got eight unanswered emails in my inbox — all from last week. Each email was sent by an enthusiastic entrepreneur who wants to meet for coffee. I know I should reply to the messages, and I know I should meet with the entrepreneurs. But they’ve written something in their emails that lots of inexperienced entrepreneurs write when they send meeting requests, and it’s a good sign that our meeting could be more harmful than helpful. It makes me not want to meet with them.
I’m sure the entrepreneurs who’ve emailed are thoughtful and mean well. I’m not trying to belittle them. Heck — I used to be just like them, sending equally naive meeting requests when I was in their position.
But…
I’m struggling to reply to their emails and schedule the meetings they’re hoping for because of what they’ve asked for. All eight of them want the same thing, and it terrifies me. According to them, they all want to:
“Meet for coffee so I can pick your brain.”
Pick my brain?!?!? Ouch!
To every entrepreneur reading this article: please stop asking to pick people’s brains. It hurts!
Obviously, I know when entrepreneurs send emails asking to pick my brain, they’re not really trying to pick my brain.
At least… I don’t think so. To be fair, I’m in the middle of binge-watching the final two seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix, so the threat of an impending zombie apocalypse doesn’t feel entirely out of the realm of possibility.
Still, as long as Rick Grimes isn’t the person sending the email, I figure it’s safe to assume when entrepreneurs ask to pick my brain, they’re reaching out because they think I’m able to help them in some way.
That’s totally fine. In fact, it’s great. Asking others for help in the entrepreneurial community is critical for startup success. In fact, every famous entrepreneur you’ve ever heard of got help by reaching out to people they didn’t know.
In other words, yes, asking for help is good. But, entrepreneurs have to learn to ask for the right kind of help, and “picking someone’s brain” isn’t it. Asking to pick someone’s brain is lazy and thoughtless. It means you don’t know what you need help with, and that’s a bad time to ask someone for help because it makes you susceptible to getting bad advice.
Remember that every successful entrepreneur has strong biases toward building companies in whatever ways worked for them. That’s fine for them, but you’re a completely different entrepreneur, and your skills and resources are inevitably different.
For example, I’m a software engineer who’s good at building products. However, I struggle with sales and marketing. As a result, I’m always telling founders they need to be more focused on work related to customer acquisition and not worry so much about their products. Is that because customer acquisition is more important than product development? Not necessarily. It’s just the aspect of building startups I struggle with the most, and, as a result, it’s the thing I over-emphasize. It’s my bias!
Everyone has a bias, which is why randomly “picking someone’s brain” isn’t a good idea. If you don’t know what you need help with, the people you’re meeting are more likely to bias the conversations toward whatever things they care about rather than the things you actually need.
Sure, by luck, the things they care about might be what you need help with, but there’s a much better chance the things they care about aren’t your biggest problems. In that case, at best, a conversation to “pick someone’s brain” is a complete waste of time. However, the more likely outcome is that the person you’re speaking with is going to convince you to focus on something you shouldn’t be worried about.
Unfortunately, I know from experience what happens when a startup founder gets convinced to focus on things he shouldn’t be worrying about. Early in my startup journey, I naively “picked the brains” of lots of entrepreneurs I admired. While the conversations were often great, the outcomes were usually terrible.
I met entrepreneurs who made me think fundraising was the most important part of building startups. I met entrepreneurs who made me think scaling was the most important part of building startups. I met entrepreneurs who convinced me to add all sorts of new features and services to what I was doing because, for them, those were the things my companies needed.
What they thought my companies needed were never what my companies actually needed. The only person qualified to figure that out was me, but I was always too busy doing what everyone else thought I should to figure anything out for myself.
I didn’t get real traction with any of my startups until I stopped relying on other people to tell me what I needed to focus on and learned to figure out what I needed for myself. Once I could do that, it changed the way I asked for help. Instead of random meetings where I wanted to “pick people’s brains,” I sent emails asking to meet about specific needs — advice on a certain type of customer acquisition strategy, an intro to a potential customer, a recommendation for a lawyer, a lead on a good hire, and so on. As a result, my meetings became more focused, the information I learned was more actionable, and my startups grew faster.
Learn to do the same thing. Don’t randomly fish for advice by “picking people’s brains.” It’s lazy, and it makes you susceptible to doing what other people want rather than what your startup actually needs. Startups don’t work that way. Your job, as the founder, is to do the hard work of figuring out what your startup needs. Leave the brain-picking to zombies.