Starting Companies: Experiential, Not Intellectual
Is analog just dorky in 2026?
It’s experiential, not just intellectual—you engage with the work it takes to move your idea and start a company in real time.
Most founder education is intellectual. You consume courses. You read books about entrepreneurship, leadership, or launching a product. You listen to podcasts about building businesses. You talk to friends and colleagues you admire about how they got started. You take notes. You highlight. You feel prepared.
But preparation and competence aren’t the same thing.
You can’t learn to start a company by reading about it. Like anyone who wants to grow muscle or get stronger, you have to get reps. Consistent, meaningful reps.
Experiential education is learning by doing. It's been foundational to my life since university.
The methodology started in outdoor and wilderness programs—places where you couldn’t fake it. If you didn’t learn to read a map, build a fire, cook over it, navigate in the dark, you felt it immediately. The work itself showed you what you knew and what you needed to learn.
Over time, it spread into universities, schools, leadership training. The core principles stayed the same:
The framework or curriculum is set high level. You decide what you need to learn, what deliverables you’ll produce, how you’ll get feedback, the pace you’ll work at, and how you want to be evaluated.
You manage your own time.
You become well-resourced through experience, time in the field, and real interactions with people who’ve done the work.
Most entrepreneurs already operate this way. You don’t wait for permission. You test. You build. You iterate. When something doesn’t land, you feel the pull to pivot and you make the move. The energy and intensity can be a lot for people who don’t work this way.
Sometimes you don’t have language for how you operate. So you think you’re “winging it” or “making it up as you go” when really, you’re using experiential education. You just didn’t know to call it that.
Self-direction is a skill you’ve already built. Starting a company is experiential. You can’t outsource it to a course or a mentor. You have to engage with the work yourself.
When I say “entrepreneur,” I’m not just talking about tech founders in Patagucci vests. I look at Taylor Swift building the infrastructure for a $2B+ Eras Tour:
Taylor conceived the idea for The Eras Tour approximately two years before it launched in March 2023.
It was the first tour ever to cross $1 billion and $2 billion.
The economic impact to US economy alone is estimated at $4.6-5 billion (NOT tour revenue), and 10+ million tickets sold across 149 shows.
She gave tour truck drivers $100K bonuses, totaling over $55 million in bonuses for her crew to recognize their hard work.
These bonuses were part of a wider distribution of $197 million in compensation to performers, technicians, and staff, highlighting her commitment to fair profit-sharing.
Come on! Value add.
I would love to see more ideas being born from artists launching production companies. Creators building networks of care. Anyone turning an idea into something that serves the good of people and creates generative value—economic, cultural, and social value.
Starting a company doesn’t mean you’re building an app or raising venture capital. It means you’re building infrastructure around your work so it can grow beyond what you can do alone.
That’s entrepreneurship. And it’s experiential.
I see patterns everywhere:
Traditional education—and most startup courses—teach you to consume. Read the material. Memorize the framework. Pass the test. Move on.
But starting a company doesn’t work that way.
You can’t read your way to understanding what your customers actually need. You have to build something. Test it with real people. Hear what doesn’t work. Iterate. Fail. Learn. Try again.
Consumption creates the illusion of progress. You finish a course and think, “Okay, now I’m ready.” But consumption isn’t competence. It’s preparation without practice.
Here’s what I’ve noticed: founders skip the experiential part because they don’t know what infrastructure to build first. They know they need to “do something,” but they don’t know WHAT to do or in what ORDER.
So they default to consuming courses, books, podcasts—because at least that feels like progress. But it might be procrastination.
When I have an idea, I don't sit at my desk for six months thinking about it. I go talk to people. Designers. Executives. Lawyers. End users. I ask: Would you use this? What's missing? What would make this essential?
Half of my work day is experiential—networking, testing, listening. The other half is building. But I can’t build well if I haven’t done the experiential work first.
Yesterday, I met with a founder who’s been a professional athlete, raised venture capital, and built a tech company. He’s launching a new brand. I showed him The Coach. He said, “Nobody teaches infrastructure and how to start a company. This holds a lot of value.”
He’s lived the gap between intellectual preparation and experiential competence. The accelerators and programs he went through all missed this—the actual infrastructure of how to start.
Infrastructure is what I didn't know I needed when I started TML. I focused on marketing and market research for the first 16 months. When the product and technology roadmap finally unfolded—because I'd grown the community first—everything started happening rapidly. I had momentum but no scaffolding.
That’s why The Coach is designed experientially, not just intellectually.
It gives you infrastructure. Problem Brief. Risk Map. MVP Blueprint. Go-To-Market Plan. 90-Day Action Plan. The scaffolding you need when you’re in idea mode, so you set yourself up for a strong start.
It is designed for experiential engagement. You download a PDF and print it. Yes, even in 2026. You handwrite your way through six weeks of work. Handwriting slows you down and encourages you to create new neural pathways. As you move through the process, the work becomes embodied. Brain-body power. You can’t skim past the hard questions. The more you do the work, the more you gain from the process. The more you engage with seeing your idea come to life.
It combines intellectual rigor with experiential practice. You’re not doing random experiments. You’re working through a systematic framework.
And you don’t have to do it alone. Soon, there will be office hours and workshops available here for paying subscribers. You’ll have access to a network of creators, company leaders, founders, and experts who’ve built companies and can help when you get stuck. They’ve been in your shoes. They want to help.
Infrastructure + experiential engagement + intellectual rigor + community.
The Coach doesn’t replace the doing. It guides you through it.
Enjoy the day!
xx,
Becca