Playing in a bigger league

Today I went to the second VCC pitch session.

First, I want to give the organisers credit. Compared with the first session, everything had taken a big step forward. You can see the club growing and our startup ecosystem growing with it.

I'm happy to be a kind of beta tester for this bigger effort to rebuild the startup ecosystem in Belarus.

But today, for the first time in a while, I felt a little shaken. The miserable rain didn't help the atmosphere either.

Here's why.

I realised I was probably one of the youngest people pitching.

Someone steps up with fifteen years of scientific experience. Another has decades in management. Someone else has deep expertise in their industry. People in their thirties and forties with an entire professional life behind them.

Something in my picture of the world broke a little.

In my head, a startup founder is, first of all, a student or a teenager sitting in a dorm room trying to change the world.

Then you look at reality and realise successful founders aren't always twenty-year-olds in hoodies. Often they're people with advanced degrees, years of work, management experience and a deep understanding of a particular field.

And on the other side, there is me.

I'm twenty. I have restless energy and an irrational belief that if you do something you love and truly commit yourself to it, sooner or later something will work out.

I can't offer the market fifteen years of expertise. I'm not an associate professor. I don't have several degrees. I've never worked in big tech.

In fact, I hadn't worked anywhere before starting my own company. I didn't even have an employment record book.

Standing next to those people, I could feel how enormous the difference was.

But I do have something to offer: energy, a point of view, desire, the willingness to learn about almost anything, and the speed with which my team and I can turn ideas into reality.

Still, in the moment, it got to me.

Then Denis, the CEO of Sequoia Health, said something that really helped:

“But that's great. At twenty, you're already playing in a higher league and competing with people who have all the things you just listed behind them.”

I thought about that on the way home. He was right.

Yes, I'm young. Yes, I have very little experience. Yes, in plenty of areas I may be objectively weaker than people who have been doing their work longer than I've been alive.

BUT I'M ACTUALLY DOING IT.

I'm not waiting until I'm thirty-five. I'm not waiting for a couple more diplomas. I'm not waiting for someone to give me permission to become an entrepreneur.

I'm doing the work.

Missing expertise? I'll study. Missing experience? I'll make mistakes and learn. Don't understand an industry? I'll talk to people who do and keep working until I understand it myself.

I also have an enormous advantage: I'm only twenty.

If I'm already sitting at the same table as people with decades of experience, I can barely imagine where I could be in ten or fifteen years if I don't stop.

Maybe one day someone will say I'm just an example of survivorship bias.

SO WHAT?

I want to become excellent at what I do, even among people twice my age. I don't care how many times I have to get things wrong along the way.

I chose a path once walked by Mark, Steve, Jeff, Elon and thousands of other entrepreneurs. Not because I think I'm their equal, but because I also want to build something truly big.

Am I supposed to give up just because someone else is forty and knows more than I do?

No chance.

Forward.

I'll finish with words that feel close to me right now: I wanted to do the thing that gives me air in my lungs. Life is complicated. You can drift with the current, or spend a long time building a ship to sail against it. Everyone chooses. I don't regret the past. I was building the ship. Now I'm moving.