If you often wonder how some companies exist and how they got funded, don’t feel confused. A lot of money went into golden rush funds to businesses that have no competitive advantage or compelling mission’s whatsoever.

This also applies to categories other than startups. As I’ve matured I’ve learned to trust my instincts and guts a lot more and be skeptical of things when the math doesn’t add up or something sounds too good to be true.

A corollary to this is a very deep phenomenon which I’d call ZIRP advice and ZIRP success. For example (and no offense), but if someone is a “millionaire” because they bought the house they lived in 40 years ago and just happened to be born in Los Angeles, then you probably don’t want to hear life advice from them on how to be successful.

This is rather a simple and direct example, however many people are good at embedding their success behind VPNs of “hard work” and “visionary” when it was purely just the right time/place and the normal distribution of the law of large numbers.

Another ZIRP phenomena that has emerged is that self-funded bootstrapped software companies are becoming rare. Perhaps one might argue that it’s a good thing and that risk is evenly distributed between founders and investors, but it really makes reading the market much harder. Take a look at the early YC batch success with todays, and compare the funding scale (inflation adjusted) between them. Take Shopify’s founding story for example, it’s as natural as it gets for a successful business biography.

The danger of ZIRP advice is not that it might not be useful to hear, but rather that it’s not general and usually applicable for certain time frames when there’s little to no friction. In other words, it’s a perfect illusion of knowledge that’s generated from being at the intersection of luck, law of large numbers, and interesting.

When I graduated, everyone around me was pouring advice my way. One filter I discovered and used to call was “The One Million Question”. Do you own a business that generates 1m$ in revenue per year or created something that 1 million people use? If not, then I’m not interested in your advice. Since then I’ve upgraded it to “The One Billion Question”. This isn’t meant to be an explicit filter, but rather a heuristic of identifying people who’ve actually worked hard and built something in the real world.

Another really powerful lesson I learned about receiving advice is to instead of asking for advice, just focus on a select few people that I really admire and would be satisfied with a career like theirs, and go look at what they said or the people that inspired them on what they said. And learn to make my own decisions from first principles.