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Back in 2003, I created a LinkedIn account. The concept of social networking for business people intrigued me. Frankly, I’m not sure why I was so intrigued, because at that time 1) I wasn’t very social (more on that some other time) and 2) I hadn’t been working for two years, and I had no intention of ever going back to work – at least not going back to work for somebody else.

I dutifully filled out my biographical information for my profile and then came upon the "Education" section of the profile. Without really thinking about it, I entered "MBA, School of Hard Knocks, Start-Ups" — sort of a tongue-in-cheek statement, based on my experience of building and managing a large piece of business from practically nothing, here in Silicon Valley.

During my career at BEA Systems, I was fortunate enough to lead and work with many talented individuals (almost all of them with either an MBA Degree or a PhD). Since I had neither, I felt obligated to put down something intriguing in the “Education’ section of my LinkedIn profile.

During the “Dot.com Revolution," we were collectively writing a book that had no precursors—making a ton of mistakes, running into barriers, hiring the right (sometimes wrong) people, learning to be agile and most importantly, learning to do things that haven’t been done before. Now, add to this a mad rush of hundreds of thousands of enterprises trying to get to the Web to take advantage of the Internet and online commerce. And the part that freaked me out the most? That MY TEAM was supposed to show them the way!

Sure, we made a lot of mistakes. Just to give you a taste of the madness during those early days—here’s my favorite quote from an angry customer, a very influential CTO at one of the top three newspapers in the U.S.: “Sam, how do you spell your last name? Because if we aren’t up and online by midnight tonight, your name and picture will be on our front page tomorrow morning.” I never so badly wanted to NOT BE on a front page before.

So what’s the point? Simply put, start-up companies trying to define a market when none exists is hard. Real hard. And experience counts. The more experience, the better.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you why I started writing this entry. I’ve received about a dozen emails during the past year from people around the globe asking me about my “Education” entry on my LinkedIn profile. Many of those emails started, “Dear Sam, I am also a graduate of The School of Hard Knocks…” I always thought that was kind of funny.

I would enjoy hearing your comments. Are you an alumnus of the School of Hard Knocks? Leave a comment here on the blog or drop me a line: sam@strongmail.com