“You'll get a hundred pieces of feedback, most of them conflicting, and ninety of them probably wrong. As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to make decisions, and you can't be a perfectionist.”
Fog of War
From Ali Tamaseb’s Super Founders (PublicAffairs, 2021), where Tamaseb’s interview with Turner runs as Turner’s own first-person account. Turner and Zach Weinberg had sold their online-advertising company, Invite Media, to Google and knew almost nothing about healthcare when they started Flatiron Health in 2012. Flatiron makes software for cancer clinics and pools patient data, with identities removed, for drug companies and researchers.
For more than a year before they formally started Flatiron, the two met ten or fifteen people a day: cancer doctors, drug-company executives, insurers. So the quote comes from a founder who had collected advice on that scale, not one who skipped it. His point is that piling up advice doesn’t produce an answer; at some point the founder has to choose without waiting for everyone to agree.
A couple of sentences before the quote, Turner names a saying he and Weinberg liked, “Strong opinions, loosely held,” and explains it as being willing to change course quickly when new data comes in. Read alongside the quote, the saying suggests why it is safe to decide before the advice agrees: the decision can change when the data does. Jeff Bezos pairs the same two ideas in his line about deciding with about 70% of the information you wish you had, adding that you also need to be good at catching bad decisions quickly and fixing them.