Specifically, high growth is useful because you can spend a few years there and get experience of doing many things at several different company sizes.
It means you get several opportunities to learn how to do a specific thing, and see how different attempts yield different results. At a company that grows more slowly you'll need to revisit things less frequently, which reduces your opportunity to learn.
You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
And in that sense, I'm continually thankful I have the experience I do in my current position. I think it means I'm materially more impactful, and I can only imagine performing significantly worse without it.
> You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
I think you're missing the critique: you don't know how useful your experience has been just because you experienced it. This is why systematic studies are necessary: to collate a lot of experiences to see what works and what doesn't (and even those are hard).
I think the content is still useful, though. Especially as it gives some examples of the type of challenge that appear routinely when scaling a company, and why experience seeing this before can help you avoid similar mistakes if you ever start your own thing.
I'd personally love to see people write competing posts from other angles, even if they too will be limited by the author's own experience.
It would be great to hear what type of stuff you can learn from working at a large corporation was particularly useful when starting a company. I'd read that in a heartbeat!
It means you get several opportunities to learn how to do a specific thing, and see how different attempts yield different results. At a company that grows more slowly you'll need to revisit things less frequently, which reduces your opportunity to learn.
You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
And in that sense, I'm continually thankful I have the experience I do in my current position. I think it means I'm materially more impactful, and I can only imagine performing significantly worse without it.