Rob Walling

Or I would talk to accounts receivable about collections and what happens when customers don't pay.

Sometimes people were too busy.

Other times they were super happy to explain to me.

They loved being an expert, right?

They liked teaching someone who's genuinely curious, which was me.

And I did the same thing later as a developer.

None of that was my job.

I was just curious about it.

And at that time, I was a nerdy developer who loved writing web application code, but learning how finance, operations, and support worked gave me a much broader understanding of how businesses in their entirety actually function.

And this was before I was an entrepreneur.

I was trying to do stuff nights and weekends at the time, but I was trying to do little tiny software projects, just me, no employees, no contractors.

But when I did eventually start my own companies, all of this mattered.

Everything I've talked about in this episode, and probably more than I'm missing, mattered.

I felt just a little bit more comfortable, a little less intimidated, because I understood the pieces of how a business works.

And if you think about all these roles, courier, electrician, developer, development manager, VP of product,

I think it was my title after selling Drip, managing a team of 20 engineers and product people.

In most of these roles, I was not even a manager.

In some of these roles, I was a teenager.

And I was just trying to do good work and learn.

And looking back, my deliberate curiosity absolutely paid off in spades for me over the next couple decades of building companies.