I didn’t join my first startup until I was 33. Before that, I spent a lot of time investing in my own experience and education by working for world-class organizations that did things really, really well at scale. That experience proved to be incredibly valuable.
I also learned from the mistakes I saw others make. I worked at my first startup—iBeam—during the go-go Internet dot-com era. We raised $250 million in capital. That’s a gigantic sum of money, and we managed to spend it month by month. We were going at a crazy speed, but our competitors were going faster. So the discussion was always, “How fast can we go?”