When experience starts blocking the way
Experienced people know why things failed before. The difficulty is noticing when the reasons have changed.
Experience is great but never let it stand in the way of progress.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten co-founded The Next Web, the technology blog and the conference it holds each spring in Amsterdam. People who run a conference for startups spend a lot of time with two groups at once: young founders who know little and try everything, and experienced investors and executives who have seen most ideas fail before. The line comes from someone who has watched both.
Experience is useful because it stores the reasons things did not work. Its weakness is that it stores the conclusion more firmly than the reasons. Someone who saw online grocery delivery collapse in 2001, when Webvan went bankrupt after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, may have concluded that online groceries do not work. The actual reasons were specific: huge warehouses built before there were customers to fill them, few households with fast internet, delivery costs too high for small orders. Some of those have since changed. Ocado, which delivers groceries in Britain from a central warehouse, went public in London last year.
Inside companies the same thing happens in smaller ways. The remark that something “was tried in 2006” can end a discussion that should have continued, because the people who tried it remember the failure clearly and have forgotten the conditions. Newcomers, who never saw the failure, are often the only people in the room willing to ask what exactly went wrong.
A simple test helps. When experience says no, ask what exactly failed last time and whether each of those causes still holds. If they do, the experience is right and the newcomers should listen. If they have changed, the experience is out of date, however vivid the memory of the failure.
The line should not become a reason to ignore the veterans. In many areas their knowledge is exactly what prevents expensive mistakes: regulation, manufacturing lead times, how long enterprise customers take to buy, what happens to companies that spend faster than they earn. A generation of founders who ignored the dot-com lessons on that last point would be relearning them the hard way. Experience should be heard in full and then tested, not obeyed or dismissed.