Before acquiring a company, the most valuable preparation is to work as a "right-hand person" to an existing small business owner. This apprenticeship provides crucial, ground-floor experience with the operational realities that financial models and spreadsheets completely miss.

To successfully transition from a large company like Microsoft to a startup, proactively seek out "zero-to-one" projects and entrepreneurial environments within the larger organization. This builds the necessary full-stack business muscle before making the leap.

CEOs of ElevenLabs and Lovable argue their time at companies like Palantir and Google was essential for learning to build at scale, understand customer problems, and develop ambitious ideas. They doubt they would have succeeded starting right out of school.

Aspiring founders should resist starting a company until they've experienced multiple full project cycles, from messy conception to messy deployment. This repetition builds an invaluable intuition for timelines, processes, and what 'good' looks like, a crucial foundation for setting credible goals and leading a team.

Bending Spoons' M&A strategy came from realizing that creating a startup from scratch (zero-to-one) is heavily luck-dependent. In contrast, scaling an existing business (one-to-N) relies on functional skills like engineering and marketing that can be systematically mastered and applied across acquisitions.

Before co-founding Calcetra, Paulina Meskinen deliberately started a consultancy focused on deep tech and energy innovation. This served as a paid, multi-year "learning journey," allowing her to build domain expertise, establish a network, and gain crucial industry insights before launching her own hardware startup.

The best way to learn M&A is not by being the first Corp Dev hire. Instead, start at a company with a mature, well-developed M&A function. This provides exposure to established best practices and a foundational playbook that can be adapted to other environments later in your career.

Startups fail when they adopt the expensive playbooks of large corporations without the same resources. Instead, identify companies at a similar stage but slightly further along. Use tools to reverse engineer their strategies, providing a realistic blueprint that fits your current scale.

Before starting his company, Nirav Tolia created 'Round Zero' for aspiring founders. This community provided a safe forum for ideas, built crucial connections, and gave him a 'trial run' as a leader. This 'beta test' built the confidence and network necessary to finally take the entrepreneurial leap.