[lawrjone]

I am absolutely not saying you can't do this. In fact, GoCardless is an example of a company started by very young founders with little start-up experience, and is now a unicorn.

The difference is that if you have this experience when starting a company, it can help you avoid so many stumbling blocks, and you can skip forward to more mature company stages.

While you can't really compare two companies, I think it's interesting that the company I currently work at (incident.io) has only taken a year to go from me joining as the first employee to 40 people + series A + hundreds of customers now.

There's no way we'd have moved so fast if it wasn't a case of replicating what we already knew worked, tweaked for the environment we found ourselves in.

So yes, it doesn't mean you can't be successful as an inexperienced founder, but I do think it makes a difference in terms of execution.