Written for EO by Will Dugdale, CTO and co-founder at Zipcube.

The only fact you can reliably say about being a start-up entrepreneur is that you will be surprised, regularly, by things you have not—and could not—anticipate.

As a CTO of an e-commerce, I have discovered many things that would have been useful to know earlier in my journey. Some of these are technical—concerning code and architecture—but most of these lessons concern people who you work with, and rely on, every day.