The Psychological Impact of Social Media on Founders
Survivorship bias, availability bias, and other psychological impacts of the social media surrounding the startup world
Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek, and I provide practical recommendations on how to build your company (or career) based on my experiences building tech companies. To learn from all past and future posts, please subscribe below.
Why I’m writing this now
Everybody has watched other people succeed where they have not. As a founder, I constantly see other people post about how they’ve taken companies to millions of dollars in revenue or raised millions of dollars in funding. I find it hard not to measure myself against them when I see their successes, but I’ve learned that by understanding my reactions to the achievements of others, I can improve my productivity.
You’ll leave this post with a deeper understanding of your reactions to other people’s successes and a strategy for ensuring your reactions are productive.
Overestimating the frequency of uncommon outcomes
How far does a company need to go for someone to post on social media, “Here’s how I’ve taken my company from $0 → $X Million in annual revenue?” What percentage of companies do you think make it that far? Here’s a set of minimum requirements for someone to get to this point.
Someone has an idea for a company.
They start to build the idea.
They finish building the idea out to the point where they show it to other people.
They acquire their first customer.
They acquire however many customers they need to get to $X Million in annual revenue.
Let’s assume that, at each stage, 10% of people make it to the next stage. So, for every person with an idea, 10% even start to build it. For every person that begins building, 10% reach the point where they show it to others. Etc. Applying this logic, 0.001% of people with an idea for a company make it to the stage where they have millions of dollars in annual revenue. So, for every person who makes it to that stage, 99,999 people don’t.
Social media doesn’t discuss the 99,999 that failed to achieve the outcome. I see the post from the one person who did because those are newsworthy. In psychology, this is known as survivorship bias.
Because of the scale of the internet and social media platforms, I’m also seeing these posts very frequently. So, it is easy for these incredibly uncommon outcomes to feel more common than they are. In psychology, this is known as availability bias.
Together, survivorship and availability bias compound and make success seem more commonplace than it is. And as I experience the day-to-day hardships of being a founder, I wrongly feel, “I must be missing something. This is easy for other people.”
What do they have that I don’t?
Acknowledging the rarity of successful outcomes is a great start, but my emotional response is still, “What do they have that I don’t?” Below, I share my reactions to other people’s accomplishments. I hope that by discussing my psychological biases, you will gain a deeper understanding of your own reactions.
Underestimating external factors
When you hear about another person’s accomplishments, do you assume the person’s accomplishment is:
Entirely something they made happen?
Entirely something that happened to them?
Somewhere in between?
When I react and feel, “What do they have that I don’t?” it’s because I think that the person’s accomplishment is a result of their efforts and not something that happened to them. In psychology, this bias is known as fundamental attribution error.
This emotional reaction goes against my belief about a person’s relationship with luck. This quote, attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca, best describes my belief in a person’s relationship with luck:
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
Preparation is entirely in your control. Opportunity is not. You are in control of maximizing your chance of finding an opportunity, but you aren’t entirely in control of whether that opportunity finds you.
Given this belief, I must believe that factors beyond their control partly drive other people’s accomplishments. They need to be prepared for the opportunity and put themselves out there, but they never fully control whether the right opportunity finds them. So, it’s not necessarily true that “they have something that I don’t.” It is possible that external factors supported their success.
Underestimating the impact of time
When you hear about another person’s accomplishments, do you:
assume it was easy for them?
assume it was hard for them?
not think about the level of effort required?
I typically don’t consider the level of effort to accomplish something when I read posts on social media. When I do, I assume the accomplishment was easier than it actually was.1 Because of these psychological biases, I either:
don’t consider the amount of time it takes other people to achieve an outcome
underestimate the amount of time it takes other people to achieve an outcome
Either case results in an unhealthy assumption that the outcome was fast and/or easy for the other person to achieve. I disregard or underestimate the (often years of) effort the person has put into achieving the outcome. As a result, I measure myself today against people who have been working on something for much longer than I have.
If I ran, I wouldn’t compare the distance I’ve run after running for 3 minutes to someone who has been running for 2 hours. But, I draw those comparisons when reading about the other people’s successes on the internet.
Turning my reaction to my advantage
Over time, I’m working to transition my reaction from, “What does this person have that I don’t?” to “This outcome probably took them a lot of time and effort. What can I learn from their experience?” This acknowledges that:
there is a chance that the outcome wasn’t entirely something they can control
there was, likely, a lot of time and effort required for them to achieve the outcome
there may be an opportunity for me to learn from them to increase the chances of my own success
Processing the success of other people
We live in an interconnected world where we are constantly exposed to people who’ve been more successful than us in the areas in which we want to succeed. Other people have gotten where you want to be and done it faster, with less effort, and at a younger age.
We aren’t in control of the what other people accomplish. We are in control of how we process those accomplishments. To do that, we need to understand our own psychological tendencies, which includes:
Overestimating the frequency of uncommon outcomes (survivorship and attribution bias)
Underestimating external factors (fundamental attribution error)
Underestimating the impact of time
Recommendation: The next time you see someone else succeed in an area where you are looking to find success (i.e., building a company, acquiring a promotion, starting a family), take a step back and consider how you feel about the news. Acknowledge your potential biases and try to transition your reaction to something productive, “This outcome probably took them a lot of time and effort. What can I learn from their experience?”
If you want to discuss how to apply this to your work, email me at newsletter@alekhagopian.com.
Validated through many conversations with fellow founders