Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 34. The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data

Bred Feld

Brad is a managing director at Foundry Group and one of the co-founders of TechStars.

A phrase that is often heard around TechStars is "the plural of anecdote is not data." While the original attribution of this quote is murky (see http://bit.ly/anecdt) the meaning is powerful and applies importantly to both mentors and entrepreneurs.

Many of the mentors in TechStars are experienced entrepreneurs. They often have started multiple companies—some successful, some not—and have a wide range of experiences. Through this experience, they've developed many stories and built anecdotes from them. These anecdotes are endearing, funny, clever, powerful, and repeated often, but they need to be put in their proper place in the information hierarchy.

While there is much for entrepreneurs to learn from storytelling and anecdotes, they run the risk of generalizing anecdotes into truths. During TechStars, entrepreneurs often get conflicting stories and advice from mentors. Mentor A believes that you should go after a specific vertical market as your market entry strategy and then explains how this worked for him in his first company. Mentor B, in a separate conversation, explains how a specific vertical market approach failed her in her first company and was a key contributor to its demise. Instead, she suggests starting out with a broadly horizontal ...