Do you need corporate experience to build a great product in 2025?

If you're building and selling a B2B product, it's probably best to have spent some time working at a company. The reasons you listed are not nearly as important as having an understanding of how companies function internally. You need to know your customers and understand what their needs are and the best way to gain that knowledge is to experience it. A corporation with 10,000 employees is likely going to have different needs and a longer purchasing process than a 100 person company so there will be vast differences between corporate experiences.

In order to build a great solution (especially in B2B SaaS), corporate experience is incredibly valuable, if not essential.

Corporate life teaches you things you can't easily learn elsewhere: discipline, working under pressure, hitting deadlines, and crucially, understanding real-world business problems that people are willing to pay to solve.

Sure, there are always examples of young founders building something that blows up without traditional corporate experience. Often, they're solving a human problem, not necessarily a complex business one. But for a thriving B2B SaaS business, you're hard-pressed to build a compelling product if you haven't lived the pain points yourself, or at least had someone with that experience give you direct, actionable feedback.

I think there's a reason the chance of startup success goes up with founder experience. The younger crowd gets the airplay because it's sexy, but business smarts are vital for building beyond just a product. Unless you're a true student of the game and get the right experienced people involved at the right time, it's an uphill battle.

The combination of all this gives us a chance to do our job as best we can. Without loads and discipline it will not be so effective.

One of the best things you learn in a corporate environment is how decision-makers go about making purchase (and renewal & cancellation) decisions, particularly if you’re working in B2B.

Many founders think it’s as simple as: “Got a need?” —> “Buy the solution”

In reality, the larger the company, the more complex the maze: from existing vendor lock-in to stakeholder apathy, from conflicting incentives to labyrinthine procurement processes, from weird incentive structures to rigid budget cycles…

Even if you’re not in sales yourself, it’s valuable to understand the complexities of selling to a company.