Every founder gets advice — a lot of advice. Investors will offer opinions. Board members will offer opinions. Customers, users, friends, and advisors will all offer opinions. And if you're even a little successful, people who you've never met will offer opinions too.
The question isn't whether to listen — it's what do you believe?
This is where having a strong point of view becomes essential. It’s what keeps you grounded when feedback conflicts, when market trends shift, and when the easy path looks tempting. A point of view is a compass. A belief system that helps you decide what to embrace, what to ignore, and what to revisit later.
A strong point of view doesn’t mean shutting out new ideas. It means knowing who you are and what you stand for. It means having conviction in your strategy, your differentiation, your “secret sauce.”
Take Ben Horowitz during the Loudcloud days. The dot-com crash gutted the hosting business, and conventional wisdom said to shut it all down. But Ben and his team believed the real value was in their software, and not the hosting itself. That conviction led them to reinvent Loudcloud as Opsware, which was later acquired for $1.6 billion. Without that belief, they might have just followed the conventional advice and folded.
Or consider Slack. Stewart Butterfield and his team were building an online game that failed. But they noticed the internal chat tool they created was solving a real pain point. Many would have told them to stay the course, tweak the game, or chase another consumer idea. Instead, their point of view was that workplace communication was broken, and they leaned into that. That insight, and the conviction to follow it, became Slack — one of the most compelling enterprise software companies of the last decade.
There will always be plenty of advice. Often it will be contradictory, and occasionally just flat-out wrong. Sometimes — many times — the loudest advice comes from people who've never done the work they're advising about.
What makes the difference isn’t just what you hear, it’s what you believe. You may find later that your point of view was wrong, and when that happens, acknowledge it and course-correct quickly. But if you don't have a point of view to begin with, you'll find yourself constantly flip-flopping — and you'll come off as someone with no idea what to do.
From time to time I come across founders — and non-founders — who are easily influenced and quick to change opinions when the latest advice rolls in. This often manifests in shifting priorities and changing directions, which creates friction and resentment across teams. People lose confidence when leadership has no conviction.
At the end of the day, you can’t control what advice comes your way. But you can control what you stand for.
In startups, as in life, having a strong point of view isn’t just helpful — it’s essential. It's what separates leaders from followers, and builders from imitators.