When I was younger, the word “experience” infuriated me. 20 years later, I know that blood, sweat, and tears are the price of experience.

Experience. What a heavy word.

When I was younger, the word sometimes infuriated me. Older colleagues often argued that I couldn’t know, because I lacked experience. Of course, they were right at the time, but arguing that way is most possibly the worst way to talk to a young colleague. You can’t blame young people for their lack of experience; it’s a simple consequence of biology.

Therefore, I avoid mentioning to younger people that they lack experience.

At the same time, being in my mid-forties now, quite a bit of experience has accumulated. Just because it infuriated me when I was younger, the purpose of this article is not to lecture younger people about the lack of their experience, but to reflect on the value of experience. As an example, let’s look back on the roughly 10 years I spent at the helm of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

The Wrong People

In most cases, growing a company means growing a team. As your customer base increases, you will need more people to help you deliver your product or service.

We have hired many great people, and we also hired some people who proved to be wrong fits retrospectively. I even had to fire a co-founder.

How come I didn’t know upfront that some people weren’t a good fit for our company? How come we all ignored the subtle warning signs until it was too late?

Well, it’s experience. You can only know what can go wrong with hiring people when you’ve done it multiple times. You can’t learn hiring from a book or from the stories of older, more experienced colleagues.

The Wrong Technology

If you build a software product, you need to make decisions about the technology you use: Database, architecture, frameworks, and components. With the myriad of products out there and the different views and expertise of your development team, making technology decisions is difficult. There isn’t a single perfect solution, and solutions that look compelling at first might end up in an outright disaster later on.

When we built our next-generation mobile app, we decided to replace the database to improve the sync performance. This was the right move given the slow sync performance of our old, first-generation app — at that time, we had few customers and few users, but our user base had outgrown the database and sync engine.

However, during the transition phase, we needed the old and the new databases. Keeping those databases in sync gave us many bugs and problems, and the full demigration of the old database took much longer than anticipated. Why? Because dependencies were harder to manage in production than we ever thought.

How come we didn’t migrate the database before working on the new app? Well, it’s experience again. I’d certainly do this differently today.

The Wrong Strategy

Hiring the wrong person or picking an unsuitable technology are suboptimal, but usually those unfortunate decisions can be corrected.

But how about choosing the wrong partners or investors, or entering the wrong markets? These decisions weigh much more heavily, but still, entrepreneurs make mistakes when making strategic decisions.

Once again, it’s experience. Inexperienced entrepreneurs say yes far more often than experienced entrepreneurs. Over time, I have learned that strategy means saying no. Try to explain this to somebody at the start of their career, when people are full of energy and want to try out all the opportunities out there.

Conclusion: The Value of Experience

If I look back at all the bad decisions I made as an entrepreneur, I could have saved a hefty amount of money, time, and grey hair if I’d known in advance.

Really?

Knowing the outcomes of a decision in advance is impossible in reality. The blood, sweat, and tears are the price you pay for experience.

Furthermore, it takes time to become good at something. So don’t be frustrated too quickly and jump ships — just hang in there, and excellence and experience will follow with time.