Founder Joy
The other side of startup madness
Much has been written recently on startup founder depression. I thought I'd explore and celebrate the other side of it — founder joy; happiness and perseverance in the face of staggering odds.
The founder joy dilemma
In The Founder’s Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman distills founder motivations down to two imperatives, wealth and control. These motives might serve as theoretical triggers for the decision to found, however, when you're in the startup trenches taking heavy fire, you experience neither wealth nor control. You must access something deeper to go on. What keeps a founder going? There must be some joy in there somewhere.
Exit through the gift shop
Fifteen year-old musician, Ferdinand Hiller, snipped a lock of gray-brown hair from Ludwig van Beethoven’s corpse, and stashed it in a locket. It was passed down and eventually sold in a 1994 auction. 167 years after Beethoven’s funeral, forensic analysis of this creepy souvenir unlocked something shocking:
Beethoven composed “Ode to Joy” at the pinnacle of his pain
Love is the answer
Ludwig overcame abdominal pain, deafness and a litany of other maladies to crank out hit after hit including his 9th Symphony containing the emblematic chorus emoting happiness. How? Why? Here’s a clue in the form of a 4 letter word — LOVE. Beethoven’s words ring true…
“Love demands all, and has a right to all.” (Beethoven)
Choose Love
I co-founded a company because my love for solving the problem far surpassed the fear of doing so and all the sacrifices I’d have to make. Life is just series of choices. Every choice boils down to two options — fear or love.
Always choose love.
Your startup journey is just a series of choices too and the same strategy applies. Sometimes decisions are fuzzy and the love option is difficult to discern. In that case, pick the option that encapsulates the least amount of fear. It might actually be the scariest one on paper but the right thing to do. Here’s a litany of things to love on your startup journey.
Love the opportunity
Seeing an opportunity, you crossed over to the other side. Economists speak of an opportunity cost of your time. Here’s what you gave up by quitting your day job: You never have to curse at another lame Sunday evening or early Monday morning email from your boss again. You might get some from customers, users or investors but those somehow feel better. You never have to endure another pointless meeting that spawns more meetings for the sake of meeting or drive to a soul-crushing place every morning. Bliss.
For entrepreneurs, all day jobs are the same. You could have a fancy office and compensation package. Who cares. If you’re not building, you’re dying. You can find one of many potential day jobs if things don’t work out. Heck, you could even become a VC. Relish the opportunity you have chosen for yourself at this point in life.
Love the madness
There are really only two career choices; be a maniac or follow a maniac. Here’s your opportunity to become the most benevolently amazing maniac your team will follow. You will cherish your sparse quality time with family and friends. You will sleep when you can. You will wake up early and excited with inspiration and directives for your team. For the love of God, learn to use buffering and scheduling communication tools so you can let your team sleep in peace while you are maniac-ing. Sync your notes, files and doodlings to the cloud too.
Love the problem
You have to love your problem like Ahab loved whaling because you may fail at whaling…a lot. Tackle the right problem and you will probably create an industry or significantly impact a nascent or dormant one. If there are some really smart naysayers trying to steer you away from the problem because others have failed, this might be a really good signal you're attacking the right thing. Here’s an example from a problem space similar to the one we are tackling; words of caution from a VC luminary:
“This problem is a bitch, you won’t solve it, and it will kill you,” (@fredwilson)
Love to tinker
If you architected your product well enough that it becomes more like a platform, you will have many levers and dials to manipulate as you react to customer and market feedback. Tinkering yields “happy accidents” that end up weaving the strands in your product’s DNA. Often, insanely great things come from founders tinkering on things they themselves want to use. Even more often, inspired team members get fed up of doing a particular thing a particular way and take it upon themselves to blow things up and build them better. I will never forget the long night a former team and I spent watching our system kill itself under the load of prime time television traffic. The next day, a few team members went skunkworks, blew it all up over the next three weekends and came back with something exponentially better.
“Make sure the thing you are working on is something you love” (@bfeld)
Love to ship
The Buddha once taught “fuck it, ship it.” You must ship early and often so you can iterate as you go along. With internet software, you have an amazing opportunity to change the velocity and vector of the bullet, in mid air, en route to one of many potential targets. Force a constant release cycle, not just for the benefit of testing but it may be one of the only constants in the chaos of startup life you can rely on. Who knows what happens tomorrow but we ship something meaningful every other Wednesday.
“Just announced a new experiment” (@rrhoover)
Love when others love your stuff
This is different than when people shower you with empty “I love you”s. I’m talking about authentic love for your product or company that often comes with constructive criticism and feature requests. You’ll know you’re succeeding at making something people love when people outside your team start evangelizing your stuff. I love it when I tell someone about my startup at a party or meetup and then overhear them proactively pitching it to others, on my behalf “they do this really cool thing…”
“Make something people love” (@alexisohanian via @paulg “build something people want”)
Love your tribe
Your co-founder and your team have your back and you have theirs. Solopreneurs take heed; it’s a lonely path. Give up the equity to gain vital support, a sounding board, different perspective and good old fashioned rah-rah when you run low on the will to persevere. Your co-founder(s) will be the only person/people who will really understand you for the next few years. He/she/they may be the only person/people you can expose your professional vulnerability to. If you choose your investors, advisors and team wisely, you will have a supportive extended tribe.
“I liken it to painting a mural at Facebook’s headquarters” (Late night note from a Team Member re: working for equity)
Love your community
It takes a village to raise a startup. With internet based startups, the world is your village. Your community consists of radiating circles, the tribes outside your immediate tribe comprised of partners, peers and mentors. Consider coffee (insert favorite beverage here) with at least two founders weekly — one who helps and one you help. You will form a special bond with mentors who went before you. Some may come from the oddest places. I have a special relationship with a UCLA linguist who died a year before I was born but left behind a whole canon of research that applies to the problem we are solving.
There are also many support services in your community for early stage startups. They help you as immigrant communities helped new immigrants who washed upon the shores of America. There is free computing from companies like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean and SoftLayer. Top venture law firms like Cooley and Gunderson Dettmer will even defer your first year’s legal fees. There are wonderful co-working spaces in your city and meetups and networking events. All API providers (too many to list here and we love them all) have devangelist teams who will roll up their sleeves and help you integrate their products into yours.
Love growth
One startup analogy goes: “you jump off a cliff and build wings on the way down”. Close. You jump off the cliff, build an extra testicle (ET?) to get kicked in and then pivot towards wings. Love the professional growth. Love the personal growth. You wont have time for the vices that comfort you and besides, people are counting on you. Love failure too. Whether you found your startup or your startup found you, you will find yourself along the way.
“Something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did” (Steve Jobs)
Love the super powers you acquire
You will get really good at:
Bouncing back, digging deep, thinking bigger, starting smaller, cold starts, finding and fostering momentum, seeing the whole game board and thinking a few moves ahead, focusing on what matters for the next 15 minutes, hour, day, week…,stretching runway, laughing at most things, asking for help and giving help and connecting the dots.
I got a fortune cookie recently that said:
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” (Fortune Cookie Ghostwriter plagiarizing Teddy Roosevelt)
Time capsule
So, here’s my ode to founder joy, penned from the trenches, before the success. History will tell if we succeed or not and I'm kind of fine with that. Now to get back to the work I love. Good luck, dear reader! If I can be helpful to you in any way, signal me. If you want to be helpful to anyone in the world, sign up for Sensay (shameless plug)
