45 Days — Chapter 1 — The Last Meeting in April

“45 Days” is a non-fiction account of my experience as the Founder of Rude Media between May 1, 2016 and June 15, 2016. 45 Days was written starting on June 16th, initially as a therapeutic effort to process my experiences internally, as well as to try to distill down an experience that very few Founders have shared openly.

June 16th — It’s been a year and a half since I traveled to the US. As I sat on the plane flying home to California for Christmas with the family in December 2014, I fresh full of ideas. We were going to take this “Rude List” thing, which we had built to help productize our blog, Rude Baguette — and turn it into Omniscient (which would eventually became Disclose), a productivity tool for journalists & their sources. After returning from California, I spent the last 18 months chasing that vision. We mocked up, we developed, we used, we iterated, we improved, we stripped it down, we applied to YC, we got rejected, we reworked it, we started to see growth, we made hundreds of thousands of euros, we spent hundreds of thousands of euros (and then some).

There may not be much of anything that is unique about our startup story. There may not be any great wisdom to take away from it. Personally, in my 4 and a half years running “France’s Startup Blog,” I’ve answered as many questions as I’ve raised. I’ve learned about where my weaknesses lie — finance (not cash management, specifically, but I’m learning everything from scratch like a new language, and I am constantly reminded that an MBA would’ve been pretty useful — at least it feels that way), product development (only after 18 months of iteration have I decided that “I’m not good at design” is just as much BS as “I’m not good at math,” something I heard all the time from non Mathematics majors). I’ve raised new questions about whether I should pursue improving my weaknesses or focusing on my strengths — the jury is still out on that one.

I know what I’m good at. I can’t quite put a word on it, at least not one I like — I hate the word “influencer,” but communication, media, events, critical thinking — I know that, if I were convinced it were the best path for myself, I could excel greatly in just doing media. So far, I haven’t taken that path.

Sitting on a similarly sized plane with a similar destination 18 months later, this flight marks the end of an era. An era where, as so many people told me but I refused to hear, I did too many things. Our 10-person team has been essentially operating three businesses for the past 3 years: events (we organize Connected Conference, ParisFounders, #PSJF, Spend, Audience,… — 10 events per year in total), news (Rude Baguette, which only just began hiring journalists this year), & product (Disclose — a communication platform for journalists & their sources).

As I sit on the plane, reflecting on the last 45 Days of our startup life, one thing has become glaringly evident: we have been working towards a long-term vision without considering that achieving step 1 was more important than building towards step 10. I’m OK with that realization. It sucks to be bad at something, and not to know how to improve it, but I know that, if I expect different results in the future, I will have to surround myself with good product people going forward if I hope to improve. I’ll also need to get more hands on with building products, with coding — I do have 6 years of computer science under my belt, which paid the bills up until 2012 before Rude Media started hosting events. Everything has rules, and I need to learn the rules of design and product in order to turn art into science.

The best way to move forward is to learn from our experiences, and I learned more in the past 45 days than I had learned in the previous 4 and a half years. It’s all still so fresh in my head — it was only a month and a half ago, after all. And yet, so much has changed.

Chapter 1: The Last Meeting in April

April 29th — It was the last Friday of April, and I had just finished speaking with our CTO, to catch him up on my last meeting of the day. He agreed with me about the current state of affairs, so I called a team meeting. We had ramped up to 12 people in the past few months — some freelancers, but we treated everyone like a committed team member — so people were sitting on the arms of the couches and pulling in desk chairs around the lounge space in order to squeeze in. It had been great having such a big team the past 30 days (our most recent hire, a former LA Times journalist, joined us at the beginning of April to prepare our editorial expansion) — we were beefing up operations in order to push growth, in order to make a great impression on the investors we had been meeting with for the past 3–4 months.

Rude Media started as Rude Baguette — I launched the blog with a fellow American in Paris who would abandon the project 5 months later, after I accused them of starting projects and not following through with them (I guess I should’ve seen it coming), and, despite the fact that the “Baguette” in Rude Baguette came from my counterpart — objectively a more well-known personality than me in 2011 — I refused to let Rude Baguette die, or to change the name. The “Rude,” after all, came from my original blog, the Rude Hitchhiker, a nickname I got in high school because, well, I hitchhiked, and I was rude — and I had had the forethought to 1) buy the domain name (the name had been my idea, even though the idea of combining our blogs had not been my idea), and 2) manage the albeit ugly wordpress site.

I stubbornly refused to let a nascent project die — it had already afforded me so many great opportunities to meet people & learn things — so I pushed on, and Rude Baguette grew to 100,000+ readers. I worked freelance on the side doing communications, sales, development — whatever was needed, whatever was a good excuse for me to learn a skill I could later apply to my own ambitions. Up until 2013, I told myself that I would use Rude Baguette to get a job at a startup I loved, where I could really invest my energy; however, once I got two offers from two great Paris startups, I realized that I was all too interested in how media worked.

In a meeting with TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare in early 2013 during a trip back home to the Silicon Valley, I asked him how they built Techcrunch up and how I could raise money to do so. He looked at me and send “You have an audience? Organize events. Take that money and invest it yourself” and so we did.

Bar meetups turned into product launch events, conferences were born, and soon we had enough money to hire engineers and even raise a round of funding from friends (& a billionaire). With that we began working on technology for journalists, because I couldn’t see a way to build the next Bloomberg without having a Terminal of my own. In the past 6 months, we’d really beefed up operations — and spending — and in the beginning of 2016, we began raising a 500K€ convertible note to tie us over until Disclose had enough traction to raise a Series A. That round had taken longer than hoped to raise, but we had a 0% bridge loan and some solid events revenue to help us slow the burn - but not stop it.

Today’s talk wasn’t planned, although everyone was waiting, wondering, pondering - most of the team, consciously or subconsciously, knew what might come.

I had always been open with my team about the status of the company — and that had always paid dividends. I’ve heard the arguments for keeping the team in the dark in order to keep them focused, and I appreciate them. Blablacar co-founder (& recent Rude Media investor) Frederic Mazzella once told me “Success doesn’t make Company Culture. Company Culture makes Success,” and I wanted our company culture to be one where everyone felt involved.

For the past two years I kicked off the year with a talk I wish I had received from the founder of a startup I worked for in 2011:

“Statistically, we won’t be working together at the end of the year,” I would tell them, “so it’s up to us to beat the odds.”

I wanted everyone to know that the passive fate of the company was death. Death by design, even, as I had always approached venture capital like an hourglass: once you’ve raised money the clock starts ticking, and spending money slowly just to slow down time won’t change the destination. As a blogger, I had approached startups who wanted my attention the same way.

“What have you done in the past 6 months?” I’d ask.

Every promise had a deadline, and your ‘future credit’ as I called it — the amount of predictions you’re permitted to express about your startup before I lose trust — was based on how much you’d already delivered, and your historical accuracy in previous predictions.

Just because I was spending money to die, doesn’t mean we spent money rapidly, or radically — in fact, we’ve managed to survive 4 years on only 200,000€ in capital raised because we had managed to do three times that in revenue in the same timeframe. As a hybrid media/technology company, the rules were simple:

1. Media (events/news) had to be profitable (events accounted for more than 95% of revenue for us — a decision made actively after looking at the advertising market and realizing that, if we were going to be make so little off of advertising, we might as well advertise our own products, namely events), and
2. Keep the Product team lean (we spent the minimum amount of money necessary to achieve optimal development speed).

The teams were generally 50/50, coincidentally, and I split my time (or so I told myself).

I hired our CTO in September 2014 right after we raised our love money round, which coincided with our first developer, a friend of mine, quitting unexpectedly to move to Nantes. We connected quickly over a burger at Joe Allen’s (he loves food. I got lucky.) — if we hadn’t been cofounders, I’d like to think we would’ve been friends. He isn’t just a great eater, he’s a great front-end developer, and an amazing team leader. He’s the kind of A-player that makes the rest of the team a little better — a friend of mine calls those people “force multipliers.” It’s how engineers call other engineer managers when they like them.

When our CTO arrived, things really kicked into gear. Day one, he decided to rewrite everything in Python. Within 6 weeks, there wasn’t a line of code he hadn’t touched or overseen. He was in. At the end of the year, we both realized that Rude List, essentially a beefed up clone of Crunchbase where our community could pitch us stories directly through the platform, while we could ask them to quantify relevant data in the news, wasn’t sufficient. We needed a platform every journalist and every source could use. So we started in January 2015 with a mock-up that we had drawn, and we knocked out 40,000 lines of code over 10 months, racking up maybe 100 users and barrels of “oh that looks great!” which kept us nourished. At the same time, our events team grew, and we began organizing major league conferences — enough to get other events organizers from Europe and the US reaching out to us for coffee when they came through Paris.

We continued to develop, to organize events, to write articles, and I was constantly looking at what we were doing worst and putting my efforts there — more articles, better social media, product feedback, QA testing, raising money, selling sponsorship packages. I can do it all, I just can only do so much in a day. By October of 2015 we were already 3 months past when we were supposed to run out of money — we were only a month behind on URSSAF payments (employment charges in France — they’re the devil), but we knew we needed to raise. Again, I sat down with the CTO & head of events and I told them the thing you’re not supposed to say:

“I haven’t been giving it my all.”

I told them that I had been pulling my punches raising money, because I was afraid of asking people I respected to give us money and getting rejected. I told them this so that they would know that I was aware of it, and it was going to stop doing it, and starting in October we opened up a convertible note round of funding of 500K€ and I began making meetings with the same CEOs I played poker with, interviewed, invited to speak on stage — and I sold them Disclose just like I’d sell a conference, and it worked.

25,000€ here, 25,000€ there. They began adding up and by the end of December we almost had 100,000€ committed. We were good for the first time in a while, and we saw a road to getting a seed fund leading the round, so we got our first offices — we hadn’t had offices since July, because 1) the wifi sucked in our shared space, and 2) did I mention we were supposed to run out of money in July?

When 2016 started, in addition to the “statistically, we’re dead at the end of the year” speech, I told everyone we were going to do 10 conference this year (we did 4 the previous year), and we were going to hire journalists, get to 1,000 users on Disclose by March, and close the round of funding by March, as well. The team was pumped, and, while we spread ourselves a bit too thin on the events size (5 events in 60 days is a punishment I wish upon no one), we were doing OK, all things considered.

I was plugging holes, the product was gaining traction, and we had great talks with VCs, negotiating valuation and terms — other media began writing about Disclose without us seeking PR, and I thought “wow, we’re actually a startup.” We had a foosball table, 4 white boards, nerf guns in the office, a fridge that was stocked with beer, a meeting room, guitars in the office, and other startups were jealous of our office, which was decorated like an old Parisian apartment (if Parisians could only afford IKEA furniture).

There was so much momentum going our way — event organizers were asking us to get involved with their events, even offering to host our events for us, and use Disclose at their events — and that’s what made the Last Meeting in April so difficult.

I looked around at all those faces. They knew that I had had a meeting with a seed VC fund earlier that day. They knew that I had had a meeting with them at the end of March, and that the investors had told us “let’s see how April goes, and we’ll talk then.” We had numbers that we were happy with — never truly happy, but they weren’t negligible — and, in my team’s eyes, I could see the perfect mix of fear, anxiousness, and excitement. No one knew which emotion I was going to evoke in them — I had taken to keeping a stone face for the day, to avoid provoking questions — so they were switching them out and keeping the others on standby in rapid succession.

“At the beginning of the year I told you that, statistically, we wouldn’t survive the end of the year. This is the conversation that I knew would most likely come someday, but I never wanted to. Team, we’re out of money. We have no prospects to raise money, and our events cashflow isn’t sufficient to keep us afloat in the mean time. There are things I know and things I don’t know. I know that you will all be paid for April, but it won’t be on May 1st. I’m confident that I can pay you for May and for the first half of June, but I don’t think it’s reasonable for any of you to expect a salary beyond then.”

It was true. The events we had organized in January to April, and our big conference in May, had done well enough that we had a month and a half of salaries in invoices that were going to come in during May, which meant I’d be able to pay everyone for April, for May, and for half of June. Beyond that, and even under those conditions (meaning that we would only pay salaries, and not our other operating costs and employment charges), things got very complicated. I hadn’t thought it all through, but I knew that I had to give them a hard deadline to drill in the reality and the gravity of the situation.

The room was silent, if only for the 5 seconds after I finished — everyone seemed to be hoping there was another sentence, another paragraph, a rousing speech about how we’ll get through it — our CTO had taken to comparing my past team speeches to the ‘we will not go quietly into the night’ speech from Independence Day. For the first time, though, it seemed necessary to not give hope — I needed it to sink in that things were bad.

What followed in the immediate was a combination of hugs, pats on the back & tears — there really is nothing harder than watching a colleague cry. I’ve watched friends cry, I’ve seen my own parents cry, and I watched a team member break down in tears as it sunk in that 1) he would soon be unemployed, and 2) the dozen of us would no longer be able to see each other every morning for coffee, pick a lunch spot in the neighborhood together, have nerf battles & jam sessions, send each other ridiculously inappropriate videos on our #random Slack channel — all that was done, and as I looked at him realizing it, I realized that the next 45 days were going to be the most intense 45 days of my life — and they were.

To continue reading 45 Days, feel free to click through the Table of Contents below, or subscribe to my posts on Medium — I’ll be adding new chapters regularly.

• Chapter 1: The Last Meeting in April
• Chapter 2: The Seven Stages of Grief
• Chapter 3: Open Heart Surgery
• Chapter 4: It’s easy to Fire in France
• Chapter 5: Ephemeral. Exclusive. Entertaining.
• More Chapters published soon — Subscribe for updates!