Growing Fast: A Startup Journey
This is my story about how I joined an early startup, and learned faster than I ever imagined was possible
It was January 25, 2012. I was just about to turn 27, with a career unfolding in finance that I just wasn’t interested in anymore. Not an uncommon place for a twenty-something I’m sure.
Sitting at my cubicle and bored out of my mind, I decided I was going to attend a Ruby meetup after work that day. I knew almost nothing about Ruby, except that’s what people used to make web apps.
The people I met were welcoming and gave me advice on how to get started. Most importantly, they were encouraging. So I decided that night I was going to learn how to code.
I’d come home from work and program for a couple of hours, gradually getting more absorbed as I understood more. Pretty soon I was able to build little apps myself. They weren’t good, but they were something. One of these little apps would pull in my LinkedIn contacts and let me add searchable notes. I put it up on Github and Heroku to show the world I was making things.
I quit my comfortable job to devote myself to coding more so that I could join a startup as a developer. For the first time in my life, I got an unpaid internship.
What’s crazy is that soon afterwards, with only an internship and a crappy app, people were interested in hiring me. Who knew.
In late May, I met Dan Berger, the founder of Social Tables for coffee. He showed me an early version of what is now our core diagramming product. Since I was a Rails developer and they were using Node.js — and I was unemployed—I agreed to work for a few days to see if it would be a good fit.
My first day happened to be the lead engineer’s last day. I remember staring at code in this foreign language and not knowing what else to ask besides “What is this piece doing? What about that piece?”
It turned out to be an exhilarating experience not knowing what the code was doing. Like a giant puzzle, I would comment out blocks of code, and observe the results. It was like reverse-engineering an alien ship by pushing every button and switch. Every time I’d flick a switch and see the lights in the room turn off, I’d get the rush of making a breakthrough.
About a month later, it had come time to launch the product. There were bugs everywhere and I’d squash them as fast as I could. I started knowing the code really well. I began to feel confident enough to refactor it and make it my own.
I learned faster than I thought was possible. I did more than I thought was possible. I had never felt so insanely productive.
Within 3 months:
I had launched a product. I rewrote our entire Node.js server code to be more stable. I interviewed and hired a junior engineer, a senior engineer, our marketing manager (now CMO), our director of sales, and a senior account executive. We came up with a pricing model and I built a shopping cart experience. We made our first dollars as a company. We crafted our company’s cultural pillars. I participated in my first focus group. I closed my first deal.
Within 6 months:
We pivoted to B2B sales. Our average sales price increased twenty-fold. I built the killer feature that landed our first major customer. I gave an on-site training for 20 users and was blown away with how much amazing feedback I got. I went to my first industry trade show. I took over the customer support line. There’s nothing quite like getting phone calls at 11pm and teaching a customer how to use the software you built.
Within 12 months:
I was promoted to VP of Engineering, my first role as a people manager. We grew our engineering team to 5 engineers. My love for Node.js was complete by now and we ripped out all of my “old” Rails code in a week. I travelled to my first investor pitch meeting. We formed a customer success team, so I no longer had to take support calls. We grew our sales and marketing teams, and our revenue started to take off.
Approaching 24 months:
I promoted a teammate to Lead Engineer. I contracted two offshore teams to build mobile apps. I’ll soon be speaking at JSConf. I’m teaching a 3-week course on how to build web applications for the non-technical people at my company. I now work with 30 amazing people I think of as my second family. We had our first profitable month.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was lucky to find the right company and founder. But none of this would have been possible anywhere else besides a startup. I agree with Kyle Tibbits that rate-of-learning is the compensation we should be talking about. Only in a startup is the risk/reward tilted so in favor of career growth. Only at an early-stage company would I be able to wear so many hats, and then ultimately focus my energy on building out a team and figuring out how to lead it. According to my latest round of 360 feedback, there’s a lot of things I still suck at. But every day is a school day. That’s why I’m here.
