This is good advice if you want to make money or be popular, but - admittedly, this may be too foreign to the current startup / indie game climate to understand - he didn't really want either.

This is bad advice for Crawford in the same way it would be bad advice for a mathematician or physicist. On the other hand they do need to be right, productive, and persuasive, and he wasn't the first two, and hasn't been the third for many years.