You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.
There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.
Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.
But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.
And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.
Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.
And those who can't.
I've already wasted too much time creating small prototypes and then cold calling/emailing VCs/YC.
It's a big club and I'm not in it, at this point I'd rather just make weird games with my friends and open source them versus trying to chase a dime.
Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.
Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.
Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.