Experience is Everything: Learning by Doing
Santa Teresa of Ávila wrote: “I will say nothing that I have not experienced.”
That sentence carries a brutal kind of humility and it applies perfectly to companies/startups.
The Authority of Having Lived It
There is a type of authority that does not come from reading, observing or analysing. It comes from having lived it:
From making decisions with incomplete information.
From hiring the wrong person.
From losing a key client.
From raising money while the runway is shrinking.
From leading a team while carrying doubts no one else can see.
Experience does not make you always right. But it changes the weight of your words. Because once you have lived something, you stop speaking only from ideas. You speak from consequence.
Action Converts Information Into Judgment
You can study the playbook. You can read books, analyse companies, attend board meetings, build investment theses and recognise patterns.
All of that has value.
In fact, learning matters deeply. I wrote about this in The Learning Pyramid: Enhancing Retention, because the way we learn changes the way we retain and apply knowledge.
And one of my favourite books on this topic is Limitless: How to Learn, Think and Perform at Your Best, because it reminds us that learning is not passive. Learning is a skill. A system. A practice.
But action teaches something different. Action teaches consequence.
It teaches what happens when the decision is yours, the risk is real and the outcome cannot be explained away in a memo.
You can know the playbook. But action tells you what the playbook forgot.
Leadership Is Choosing Through Noise
I have said this in many posts, but I keep coming back to it because it is one of the clearest definitions of leadership I know: a good leader is not someone who has all the answers, but someone who can make the right decisions surrounded by uncertainty.
A good leader is able to navigate through noise and still choose a direction. That is what building a company really tests. Not whether you can sound smart in a meeting, create the perfect strategy deck or explain the market beautifully after the fact, but whether you can decide when the information is incomplete, the pressure is high and the consequences are real.
In real life, clarity almost never arrives before the decision. Customers give mixed signals. Investors show interest, then delay. The team needs confidence while you are still processing doubt. The market changes before your plan is finished. Your metrics tell one story on Monday and a different one on Friday. And still, you have to move.
That is leadership. Not certainty, but direction.
A leader does not eliminate uncertainty. A leader learns to move through it. They listen, observe, think and adjust, but at some point, they decide. Because doing nothing is also a decision. Waiting for perfect clarity is also a decision. And in startups, waiting too long can be more dangerous than being wrong.
This is why lived experience matters so much. When you have been in the arena, you understand that leadership is not clean. It is messy, emotional, lonely and full of trade-offs. You rarely choose between good and bad. Most of the time, you choose between imperfect options: growth or profitability, speed or quality, ambition or survival, confidence or honesty, patience or urgency.
The founder’s job is to choose a direction without pretending the uncertainty does not exist.
That is why action converts information into judgment. Judgment is not built by observing uncertainty from a safe distance. It is built by making decisions inside uncertainty, living with the consequences and learning from them.
That is the real classroom of leadership.
The VC/Investor Blind Spot
This matters a lot in Venture Capital. Many investors are brilliant. They see markets, opportunities and patterns that founders often miss because founders are inside the storm.
That distance has value. But distance also has a limit. Seeing 100 companies is not the same as building one.
Reading board decks is not the same as surviving the chaos behind them. Recognising patterns is not the same as carrying the consequences. The problem is not that some people in VC have never founded a company. The problem is when they speak with the certainty of someone who has. That is borrowed conviction.
It is possible to be close to the fire without having been burned. And that difference matters.
My point
Speak from what you have lived. Founders need humility too. Having built something does not automatically make you wise. Some founders confuse their path with a universal law. Some turn scars into ego. Some forget that one company, one market and one timing do not explain every company, every market and every timing.
Experience gives you authority. Reflection makes it useful. Humility makes it safe.
So maybe the rule is simple: Speak clearly about what you have lived. Be honest about what you have only observed. Respect the difference between knowledge, pattern recognition and consequence. Never confuse proximity to the fire with having been burned. Please have fun & avoid average. Thanks for reading!