The world is big enough to play the role (of devil’s advocate).
Really.
A great (startup) team needs believers – the ones who foolishly and deeply believe in the startup mission; to a point that they can comfortably ignore all the naysayers and in the process, inspire each and every one of the team members and early adopters to think beyond the obvious.
It’s very easy for one to play devil’s advocate role. It takes literally nothing to sound negative-and-smart. It’s a super-lazy job that has its rewards – i.e. be seen as smart in the short term.
If left to devil’s advocate, none of the world’s defining products or even the self-sustainable ideas would even exist.
- Why would anyone launch OpenAI (when no one asked for it)?
- Why would anyone still build Midjourney (when nearest competitors are so heavily funded)?
- Why would anyone build Perplexity (when there is Google)?
It takes believers to turn things around. To create new things.
But devil’s advocate help stay grounded, no?
Not really. They just plant the seed of doubt. They are always at the fence and scared of going deep.
They are the ones who always want to be seen right – esp when things go down and they get to say ‘look! I told you guys about this’.
And too many of them just results in a team of sheep with no courage and no ambition for a glory.
The fav words of a devil’s advocate says has sentences starting with What if.
The believes say too many sentences with ‘So What’.
You hear more ‘Why nots’ from believers than anybody else.
Early stage startups are bloody hard – and you need to be a foolish to believe that everything will work out.
Your market is enough to play the real devil or God – depending on whether the market rejects your startup or embrace it.
Anybody else playing devil’s advocate doesn’t need to be in your early team.
Yes – you do need a strong feedback loop for your startup – go out in the market and collect those. But the ones who are asking too many ‘What ifs’ probably do not need to be in your team.
Let them be where they deserve to be – hell.
