This week, a three-time founder opens up about his quest for intellectual honesty after a decade and a half in the startup arena.
The Uncomfortable Truth: A 3X Founder's Guide to Intellectual Honesty
Nobody wants to be wrong. Especially not founders, a famously stubborn (and hopeful) bunch. And for good reason — a strong will is requisite to turn “what ifs” into a reality.
But that same dogged optimism can lead founders to turn a blind eye to meaningful feedback or warning signs when things aren’t working. That’s why Bob Moore thinks a healthy dose of intellectual honesty is a must-have for founders.
Intellectual honesty isn’t about always being right. It’s about always seeking the truth, even if it contradicts your beliefs (and hopes). It's holding up a mirror to the sneakier confirmation biases we fall for to protect our egos.
Here’s how Moore defines it for founders: “Being intellectually honest means being willing to understand the difference between noise and signal in the things that aren’t working in your business.”
It’s a quality he wishes he had more of back when he was building his first startup, an analytics platform called RJMetrics. Despite launching in the wake of the 2008 downturn, RJMetrics bootstrapped its way to product-market fit. But several years later, Moore and his team overlooked signs that the market was moving in another direction and competition was quietly forging ahead — and they fell out of product-market fit.
“If I had to distill the lesson from that experience down to something that I wish I had more of back then, and something I’ve worked on a lot since, it’s this idea of intellectual honesty. It’s something that all founders need to care really deeply about,” he says.
In this exclusive interview, Moore lays out a guide for how founders can put intellectual honesty into practice, alongside examples of the confirmation biases that can be most deceptive for founders and how he combats them now as he builds his third startup, Crossbeam.
A few of the biases he bumped into:
- Chasing market trends or passions when choosing a startup idea — without being honest about your own strengths. This was the story of RJMetrics. “We went in as mercenaries. We wanted in on this startup game and big data was increasingly a thing. I knew how to write a damn good SQL query. But that was all we had,” says Moore. “I didn't have strong conviction.”
- Having a “they’re the dumb ones” mentality. One of the first warning signals that the market was moving away from RJMetrics was a rising churn rate. But at the time, Moore chalked it up to their customers making bad business decisions. “When you notice you’re becoming more dismissive of people and things that you think don't know as well as you do, because they haven't been doing this as long as you, it's time to do that intellectual honesty check and see if maybe there's something else going on,” he says.
Moore’s advice is geared toward the founder seat, but his truth-seeking tactics are worth a read for anyone in the business of building with integrity.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-A complementary read from Wes Kao on intellectual honesty in the workplace
-Molly Graham’s advice for working at a rapidly scaling startup
-Notion co-founder Simon Last on building Notion AI