The Power of Having Nothing Going On
Here at iDoneThis, we think that we’re finally on the right track, two years after bringing the company from New York to San Francisco. While I was back in New York, I caught up on the last two years with Shawn Liu and Danny Wen, founders of Harvest. I described life in the Bay Area tech scene and the drama of multiple fundraises, acquisition courtships, and dealing with VCs. Shawn laughed, and then he told me a surprising ingredient to their success that I never would’ve guessed.
Danny and Shawn started working together in 2003 as a two-man web design studio, out of the ashes of the dot com bust. As consulting business grew, they found themselves needing a way to easily track time and invoice their clients. But they couldn't find applications that fit the bill—out of this frustration, Harvest was born.
Over the last ten years, Shawn and Danny have built Harvest into a fantastically profitable, growing business that boasts thousands of customers from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. And they did it 100% bootstrapped, without a dime of outside funding, in the city of New York.
“The thing is,” Shawn said, “when we started in 2003 in New York, there was nothing going on.” There was nothing to do—no investors to pitch, no parties to attend, no acquihire prospects—nothing, save building a product that solved a problem and made money.
What Shawn said brought to mind an article about the power of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Silicon Valley entrepreneur and YC alum Paul Stamatiou recalled that Paul Graham, YC founder, exhorted founders to “use YC as an excuse to not get distracted with other events/meetings/people . . . tell them you're busy for these three months.” The value of being part of the most talked about group of startups around is not having to do any talking.
The power of having nothing going on is about how focus and freedom from distraction allows us to do our best work, but more than that, it’s about getting the space you need to build a company that’s personal and completely original—and that’s what I admire most about Harvest.
They’ve built a unique company that’s the product of independent thought, and you can recognize their personal voice in the people of Harvest, its values, office, bookshelf, coffee, snacks, product. Their software solves a problem that makes life miserable for many many people. If you’ve ever suffered the painful experience of using built-for-corporate-adminstrators time tracking solutions, you’ll know that time tracking and invoicing has never been an appealing aspect of life. Harvest is the complete opposite—clean, intuitive, and a joy to use.
Learning what’s important and stripping out the extraneous is how you achieve an economy of motion and hone your thinking to a point of effectiveness and expressiveness. For me, that means getting closer to a place where I have nothing going on.
