My first startup was simply a series of mistakes :

• Non-hacker founder
• Distrust for sales & marketing
• Split equity 50/25/25 which translated to commitment split of 120/-10/-10
• Fear of speaking to users until after company dissolved

My wife and I eventually began to talk to users and pivot once the first startup failed (primarily founder relationship problems from commitment levels). Although we ended where we should have started, we were in an old-school business strategy environment that encouraged focusing enterprise growth as opposed to doing the things that don’t scale – talking to users. When there were crickets after my pitch to a boardroom full of biotech investors on our new groundbreaking social network, I threw in the towel.

The experience was humbling, but I learned some invaluable lessons:

• Get to know users before you start building anything for them
• Be a hacker-founder so you can collapse the idea => shipping => user loop
• Make friends long before making founders
• Split equity evenly on a standard 4-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff for all committed founders (if you don’t trust one another to do that, avoid the pain of starting a failing startup together)

No accredited education imaginable can teach the mind-shaping lessons that failing at your own startup can.