Member-only story
“Nothing seems to faze you,” “Raul”, one of my investors, said to me during our 1:1 meeting in his office. He’d been an investor in our company for one year. Raul was pretty crusty, so I considered what he said to be a compliment.
More importantly, Raul was right. I’d been building towards running a company for over twenty years. I knew the playbook, inside and out.
My co-founders, all of whom were over forty too, knew the playbook as well. Our age and experience was a huge competitive advantage.
However, the better question was why? What did age and experience buy us that youth and exuberance couldn’t buy us?
Advantage number one: You’re steady at the wheel when you’ve got experience.
Just like Raul said to me, nothing phases you when you have lots of experience. You don’t get too high and you don’t get too low.
For example, when our fabrication facility inverted a mask layer, causing our first product not to work and costing us several months, we didn’t go to pieces. Instead, we knew that we needed to negotiate with our fab, TSMC, to get them to admit their mistake and expedite a new set of wafers through their facility for free.
