After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.
Founder advice is for founders.
Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.
I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
Take everything with a grain of salt.
I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)
To be fair, he did say that his first target was 10 customers. I assume all 10 of them happy as he mentioned.
He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
The reason this works is that you're identifying the individuals who are able to make success happen while having the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.