Never interfere in a boy and girl fight

“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old: Never interfere in a boy and girl fight….”

— Words of advice for young people, William S. Burroughs

I tend not to give advice nowadays. I listen. I will express an opinion sometimes (okay, often). But I won’t tell you what to do. The reasons are simple. People will do what they will do. They will have a complex set of reasons and stimulae behind their actions, and some degree of agency in them (just how much is in interesting topic for debate in another forum). However if they act in alignment with my suggested course of action and they arrive at a position they’re unhappy with, they will always blame me for telling them what to do. If things work out hunky-dory they will celebrate their decisive genius.

William S. Burroughs knows no such restraint and in his wonderful little riff “words of advice for young people” that I have an on old CD somewhere he leads off with the great advice I can buy into:

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”

It amazes me how people in Silicon Valley have so much difficulty following this.  If you’re an entrepreneur focus on building a great company and changing the world. Whether Arrington or Calacanis is right really isn’t of concern to you and you can never know. Whether Conway or McClure is right is irrelevant to you if you don’t build anything that either of them is interested in hearing your pitch on.



The truth is you can never know the detailed interplay which goes into any relationship between two third-parties.  You can know how they’ve dealt with you and what you’ve observed and that is it.

• Arrington produces a great product (TechCrunch) that has been a huge help to me and other startups. We owe him and his team a great debt of thanks for that. Further I’ve enjoyed wonderful parties, movie premieres and an awesome 24 hour coding Hackathon, all courtesy of Arrington’s decision to give back to the community (yes, I know, all part of building the brand). The closest I have come to meeting him in person was sitting right in front of him at the Star Trek premiere when he seemed like an engaging and fun guy.  He is honestly passionate about startups and entrepreneurs. He’s on our side. He’s one of us.
• Jason Calacanis has never been other than gracious and generous to me. His This Week In Startups podcast is a very good thing for the startup community. Reducing information asymmetry. Listen the whole archive for great insights into startups and the funding process. Sure, he’s a provocateur and you don’t have to agree with him on everything (particularly as he sometimes changes his mind, as people have the right to do). But he doesn’t demand that you agree with him on it all. I joined him for lunch when he tweeted out that he was in Palo Alto and he was wonderful company. He was in town to speak at a Founder Institute event to which I didn’t have a ticket, and with no agenda he arranged my free attendance. His Open Angel Forum is unquestionably a good thing. I attended. He asked questions that were tough and left me pissed off. Pissed off because I should have been better prepared with better answers. If you’re an entrepreneur you have to know, he’s on our side. He’s one of us.
• I have merely bumped into Ron Conway at a couple of events, never at times when a pitch would be appropriate. I have no idea why so many entrepreneurs suddenly have an opinion on him that is anything other than positive. I was in a major VC firm last week where he and Maples were the only two angels they had positive things to say about. Everything I have read and heard from people who I respect points to him being a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.
• I have met Dave McClure a couple of times. As Sacca said in his email about Angelgate, McClure would take a bullet for his startups. The work he’s put into the Lean Startup movement. His blog. His really helpful presentations on startup marketing for pirates are must-reads. He’s a genuine friend to the entrepreneurial community.

The point is you - as a fellow entrepreneur - don’t have to take a side on this stuff, you don’t have to post a comment to suck up to someone who will never see your comment and doesn’t care. These guys will either kiss and make up or they won’t. Either way, hopefully they’ll all keep doing the great things they have all done in recent years to make this the best time in history to be doing a startup.

Let me say that again:  All of these people have contributed to making this the BEST TIME EVER TO DO A HIGH-TECH STARTUP!


Everyone likes to have an opinion. Everyone likes to have an opinion on the opinions of others. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what my opinion of the opinions of others should be.

Sure, I have an opinion on Angelgate - my experience at Open Angel Forum is that afterwards the angels there all chatted for a good while after the pitches about how deals could be better structured to lower costs and friction, and make things better for the entrepreneurs. The pitching startups were still in the room at this time. There was no secrecy or nefarious nature to this. ‘Let’s get together and keep talking about this’ seemed to be the net result and that’s probably what the Angelgate dinner was all about.

These guys are on our side as entrepreneurs.

People love conspiracy theories. They’re convinced any time people get together they’re plotting. I went to the Bohemian Grove last year as the guest of a good friend. If you google it you’d think it was some secret society where the rich and powerful plot to rule the world. It’s not. It’s a really nice pleasant place for people to retreat from the world of business and enjoy the arts and a bit of culture in pleasant surroundings among friends. But you’ll never convince the tin-hat brigade of that.

Similarly a journalist will be (rightly) skeptical of prominent people in the industry he covers getting together privately, and there will always be a constituency of embittered entrepreneurs ready to believe investors have it in for them.

In the end though, I don’t have to take a side in these fights. I am too busy. I am grateful to all of these people for making my very-tough job a little bit easier. I don’t agree with all of them on everything:

• I think some of the TechCrunch writing has got weaker (while a lot is still top notch we all know that there’s a big range in terms of writing quality). And I think Arrington was wrong on Angelgate.
• I think Jason can get too personal and is a bit too aggressive in his anti-Facebook stance (Zuck deserves far more respect than he is often given IMHO, but has made some mis-steps like we all do).
• I think Conway is wrong with his statements about when Founders should take liquidity (it’s not the same to say a Founder should get paid off the same time the engineers who came in later and always had a paycheck, and you can get a misalignment between later VCs and Founders if you don’t let them take feed-the-family money off the table).
• I love the new angel movement but I think the emphasis on social proof is a mistake and is dangerously leaning towards a cool-kids funnel (which could end up as bad as the post dot.com crash trend of VCs falling back on just funding their MBA buddies which delivered such poor returns).

But those are just my opinions.  I wish my industry wasn’t becoming the soap opera it is, but I think it’s a trend that’s not going to reverse any time soon. If you’re serious about building something great and changing the world as an entrepreneur it’s fine to rubberneck at this stuff if you find it entertaining, but, to break my no advice rule, stay out of it. It’s not your business. Stay focused.

“Never interfere in a boy and girl fight”