Consulting is expensive tuition for understanding scale constraints

A year of consulting inside mid-market and late-stage companies will teach an aspiring founder things no startup will: what breaks at 50 people, what breaks at 500, what the VP of Sales actually tracks, what the CFO actually fears, why the board meeting went the way it did.

This is the tuition most founders never pay. They build from founder instinct, hit the scale wall somewhere between $3M and $30M ARR, and spend two years re-learning what a quarter inside a Series D would have taught them in ten weeks.

Not a recommendation to go consult. A recommendation to realize: if you're 28 and haven't built, you're not behind. You're collecting tuition.