We’re accumulating a huge experience debt

I previously co-founded and scaled a company that raised over $70M, grew to 200+ people, and that I recently sold.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with founders and scale-ups.

And there’s something I find increasingly hard to ignore.

We keep making the same mistakes.

• Raising too early.

• Raising too late.

• Hiring too fast.

• Staying too long with the wrong customer.

• Building before really understanding the problem.

• Mistaking early interest for product-market fit.

What keeps me up at night is not that companies fail.

Entrepreneurship will always involve risk. It should.

What bothers me is seeing companies fail for reasons that others have already experienced, understood, and sometimes documented years before.

It feels like we’re accumulating a massive experience debt.

Every generation of founders learns an enormous amount, but too much of that knowledge stays fragmented, trapped in individual experiences, boards, investor conversations, post-mortems, or simply in people’s heads.

Then the next founder has to rediscover it.

Again.

That’s the problem I’ve decided to spend my next chapter working on.

Not to eliminate entrepreneurial risk.

But to help make more failures avoidable.

I want to contribute what I’ve learned, but even more importantly, keep learning from other founders and turn that collective experience into something useful for the people building next.

That’s why I created Ember.do: an AI second brain and team of AI agents built for founders and their teams.

I launched it commercially at the end of June. We passed 1,000 signups in the first two weeks, and that number doubled over the summer.

We’re still very early, and I’m learning every day from the people using it.

So if Ember can help you think through a decision, challenge an assumption, or avoid one mistake along the way, I’d be genuinely happy for you to try it.

And I’d love your feedback.

What’s one mistake you made that you now see other founders repeating?