It was only after spending the past couple of decades of my career working at big companies that I decided to become an entrepreneur. My team and I are now in the midst of building Ellevest , a digital investment platform for women. As I’ve made that transition, I’ve gotten a lot of advice, all of it well-meaning, but some of it pretty bad.

Other entrepreneurs can surely relate to the surplus of people offering their unsolicited counsel. Usually it’s easy to tell which input to dismiss, but sometimes even bad advice can leave you second-guessing yourself. Here’s the worst of what I’ve heard and how I’ve pushed it aside.

Don’t start Ellevest, Sallie. You don’t want to limit your business to a niche market.

Women? A niche? Seriously?

Don’t start Ellevest. If you do, you won’t be able to come back to corporate America after you’ve left it.

First of all, so what? Not every entrepreneur leaves a career in a big organization before launching their own business, but all need to do some serious thinking before striking out on their own. Choosing to take that plunge is a huge decision either way, and it’s one that nobody’s had to reckon with more deeply than entrepreneurs ourselves. By that point, we’ve already determined that the benefits outweigh the risks.

And second, this pessimistic advice casts the notion of expanding your skill set and experiences as something to be wary of. It isn’t.

Don’t start Ellevest. You’ll fail. Other people have tried similar things, and they’ve failed. If it were possible to get women to invest, one of those other guys would’ve succeeded already.

It’s true that the failure rate for startups is high, but self-defeating logic like this would put an end to innovation itself if every would-be entrepreneur followed it.

Okay, now that you’re insisting on starting your company, raise money at a high valuation, because you can.

That may work–at least up until it’s time to raise the next round. At that point it might turn out to have been a terrible decision. And this doesn’t take into account a more important factor (I would say a much more important factor), which is who the investor is, whether they buy into your startup’s vision, and what their time horizon looks like.