Are you experienced?

As we grow our business, as I come across new situations and concepts, it becomes apparent that I already know them—or at least, in theory. Ten years ago, I started consuming all the books by experts like Eric Ries and Steve Blank and pretty much everything published by Y Combinator. It was these thought leaders (and more) who prepared me.?

Reading or attending business classes and learning about concepts, processes, and customer experience are all valuable, but they remain abstract concepts until we work with them for real. It's difficult for humans to learn from other people's experiences. Conversely, it's easier to grasp something with added practical experience. Take hiring advice, for example. Hiring is typically a huge challenge for startups, and we’re no different. I often heard other founders talk about it, but I couldn't relate. Now, I'm experiencing the reality first-hand. Sourcing and interviewing candidates is time and energy-consuming. With great candidates and such a competitive job market, it's a two-way street. I have to sell myself and my company to them as much as they have to present their skills to me.?

I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

- Confucius

And we can get recruitment wrong for so many reasons. That's evident from statistics suggesting that for startup leadership hires such as sales VPs, you get it wrong on average 50% of the time. Even when you're a good interviewer, candidates present themselves well, and you both believe you'll be a good fit; even then, it might fail to work out. There are so many unforeseen variables that you can only learn through experience.

Corporate experience doesn't necessarily apply to startups. There are nuances in a startup culture that might well be less stuffy and more fun. The classic example is someone from a corporate environment, like a major software company, rolling into a startup with nowhere near the same infrastructure or culture. Even if they were building something within the corporate environment, it's different from a bootstrapped startup. Amongst other things, in startups, the higher you go up in the hierarchy, the more work you get. Whereas usually, in large corporations, the higher you go, while you might have more responsibilities, you'll also get a lot more support.?

Trust your gut

If you need to learn a thing, then read. Consider how it could apply to your business, then adopt it, even if it goes against your intuition. One of the big lessons I learned was to follow my gut often, even if it didn't feel right. For instance, when a candidate looks great on paper and says all the right things, a gut feeling says they'll be great. Or when a prospective customer says they will sign, but something feels off—that's your intuition, which is mostly correct. As founders learning on the job, sometimes it's all we can trust. And as with your many experiences in life, your subconscious has been trained. Your subconscious can give you signals, and the way it communicates is emotional, not intellectual. So it can take practice to be in tune and listen to your intuition.?

Even if wrong, it's good to follow through on your intuition, and here's why: If your intuition says to do X, and it turns out Y was the correct answer, then that experience will suck for you; you will feel that pain, which will be a powerful signal to your intuition. It's training and reconditioning. And even if your intuition is "wrong," it doesn't matter. There is no failure; there's only learning.?

Learn from others

It takes a lot of work to train your intuition. Do the work and learn the lessons, and it will improve. How to best learn? Aside from reading, connect with peers. Talk to other startup founders to understand similar struggles they've experienced so it's easier to apply a solution. It's also a great way to vent and put things into perspective. A problem shared is a problem halved, right??

One of the things I did early on was to put together a “mastermind” (a term borrowed from Napoleon Hills’ Think and Grow Rich), comprising non-competing entrepreneurs who’re in our industry. We even have a shared Slack channel. It’s not like we talk regularly or tell each other what to do, but being able to tap into this group and share some rare industry knowledge has helped at crucial moments.

You might be surprised by how well you're doing and how good you are at certain things. Sometimes it provides much-needed emotional relief because very few people understand your position. Let's be honest: being a founder can be lonely work.

Early on, I learned to appreciate the value of mentors, and finding them truly helped DESelect and me personally. Several of our mentors are now on our advisory board, but some are more informal. It's a chicken-and-egg problem because success attracts talent but requires time and effort. The best mentors are drawn to success or, at least, its promise. They see something early that looks promising, something that excites them. They want to help the people they believe in the most. They might even learn something from you once in a while. But don't expect a lot of mentoring if you've nothing to show. It's another two-way street.

The founders’ trail

The founder’s trail is a hero’s journey. In pursuit of adventure, we dive fearlessly headlong into the unknown, picking up a mentor or two along the way. Hurdles are part for this course, but we treat these trials and any associated failures as valuable opportunities to evolve through the experience. To the founder, there’s no such thing as failure; there is only learning. Almost feverishly, we are driven by the prospect of growth; our passion serves as a phenomenal tool. Exponential growth comes from an openness to learn, so we dedicate time to personal development and that of our team.?

One way or the other, this experience will transform us all. Ultimately, the only way to gain experience is to set off on the trail, taking it one step at a time. As a wise man once said, “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.”?