Startup advice is dangerous not because it's wrong, but because it's partially right. The partial correctness makes it sticky. The missing context makes it harmful. Every piece of startup advice encodes a hidden assumption about timing, resources, and market conditions that the advisor never states and the listener never questions.
Survivorship Advice
When a former Facebook product lead says "at Facebook, we always..." they are actually saying: "at this specific company, with this specific user base, this specific capital structure, and this specific competitive landscape, we did X." The context is load-bearing. The tweet-length version strips it out entirely.
This is the most seductive category because it comes from winners. The frameworks are elegant. The case studies are compelling. The advice is correct -- for a situation you are almost certainly not in. Facebook's growth playbook applied to a pre-PMF startup with 200 users is not a strategy. It's cosplay.
Failure-Reactive Advice
The second category comes from founders who failed and distilled that failure into absolutes. "Never hire remote." "VCs will destroy your company." "Product-market fit is a myth."
These claims are diagnostic of the advisor, not the advice. Complex failures have multiple interacting causes. When a founder attributes their outcome to a single variable, they are compressing a multivariate system into a narrative that protects their ego. Correlation posing as causation.
Processed Failure
The trickiest category: founders who failed, reflected carefully, and extracted genuine lessons. Their advice often sounds right because it is right -- for their specific situation. But even well-processed failure is a sample size of one. The lesson "we should have raised more before expanding" might be correct for their burn rate, their market, their timing. It says nothing about yours.
The Recursive Problem
Any framework for evaluating startup advice -- including this one -- is itself startup advice, subject to the same limitations. The only durable approach is developing judgment through direct contact with your own market, your own customers, and your own constraints.
Every successful company is the product of specific people solving a specific problem in a specific context. Transferable playbooks don't exist. The search for them is the distraction.