Get in and go H.A.M.
Musings from four years at ShareThis
It was four years ago last Saturday when I started at ShareThis. The anniversary acknowledgement was originally meant to be Tweet-size, or a pic, but I had a lot in my head about the experience thus far, so here goes a bit of it.
It’s been an incredible experience helping to build an ad business from zero to something. We’ve received a lot of accolades and press that have validated our hard work and the idea that online sharing is indeed vital to brands and publishers alike. Over four years, I’ve collected countless ShareThis T-shirts, life-long friends, broken ping-pong paddles, Delta miles, pitched the ShareThis good-word a few times, had some good ideas, and some shitty ones. I’ve learned and matured more in four years, both personally and professionally, than I have in the last 10 combined. It’s hard to capture much of it in words, but the process of reflecting alone has been really enjoyable.
The four year mark gets a lot of hype these days, especially in the job-hopping, paper-money-laden, ADD tech world, but considering our parents generation worked at companies for 20+ years, it seems over-hyped. Part of the hype is because our industry is outcome-obsessed. We all fantasize our IPO’s and have countless “damn, why didn’t I take that gig then” moments, all of which I couldn’t be more guilty of. The reality is that the gap between what you do every day, every hour, and the outcome you obsess over is almost infinite. In Ben Horowitz fashion, this Outkast quote sums it up:
“fuck wishing, you missing the ambition of your mission”
A couple weeks ago, when RocketFuel’s stock had bottomed out after dropping almost 70% of it’s peak value, I gchatted our CEO and instead of participating in the industry gossip, he responded simply “I know man, just proves that all we can do is focus on building a great company.” I expected a “holy shit” response but I got salient piece of advice that has stuck with me since. He’s right; you can’t control the noise, the press, the public markets, the temper of VC’s towards tech companies, your competition, or anything in the past, so why lose focus on the right things by obsessing over it? It sounds simple enough, but it took me four years to realize it.
When taking the risk of a job at a start-up, or early stage company, all you can do is make an educated guess based on the product, people, vision, VC’s, competition, white-space, etc, and then work your ass off, likely for much longer than four years. That’s all you can control and the more your head is down, laser-focused, the better the outcome of your specific job will be. Tune out the drama, build a better product, build a better team, refine your pitch again, obsess over the details of those things. The quick and easy exit is certainly the unlikely one, yet it seems to be somewhat of an expectation. My goal is to turn the page a bit and spend the next four years obsessing over something more important that I can help control; building a great company.
