Content Marketing Is Not Scripture
I work with a CEO who went through Y Combinator. They often quote advice from their program: blog posts, essays, videos. The tone is reverent! These aren’t ideas to weigh or interpret; they’re rules to follow.
Y Combinator says your valuation should be X if your ARR is Y—so that’s the valuation.
YC says fundraising sucks, so let’s avoid it as long as humanly possible.
Investors are a necessary evil, so assume conflict is coming.
I’ve seen the same thing happen with founders quoting First Round Review, or a tweet from a Tier 1 VC, or a podcast from someone who “scaled to $100M.” The content is treated like assembly instructions: follow the steps, get the result.
A lot of the advice is excellent. But it’s still content marketing. It's meant to attract the kinds of founders these firms want to work with, and it serves their brand. There are two problems with taking this stuff literally.
The first is that you might mistake the show kitchen for the real kitchen. The real kitchen is hotter, louder, and messier. It's where sauce is splattered on the walls and where fingertips end up sliced off in the soup. This is not the stuff the restaurant wants the customers to see! But it is how the food really gets made, and the difference is exactly why experience is so valuable.
(Experience is funny: the more of it I have, the more I value it).
The second is that you might mistake guidance for gospel. Good advice isn’t a blueprint. Instead, it’s context. It’s theory. It’s pattern recognition. And like all research, it has to be interpreted.
Doctors don’t treat the average patient; they treat you. They read medical literature, then apply judgment, experience, and context to decide what to do in your specific case.
A founder’s job is similar. You can absolutely self-diagnose! But you need to actually diagnose, not just follow steps. Great entrepreneurs ask: Does this advice fit my company? My team? My market? They read content like a doctor reads a study—critically, contextually, and with a bias toward action, not obedience.
Content marketing can be genuinely helpful. But it’s not scripture.