Always exceed expectations

If you’ve interacted with me in the past week, I’ve probably brought up Jason Calacanis’s recent blog post about being an awesome employee at least once.

I think I love this article because it reminds me of my early days with Dispatch and the hard work we did to get here, and inspires me to do better — it reminds me of what every one of my teammates should expect from me and I from them.

My job is a privilege. I really believe that. I really wake up every morning and feel compelled to go to work and outperform myself because I believe that I have an honor and unique opportunity to work at Dispatch and help contribute towards our mission. I believe it more and more everyday I am there. That realization of the privilege I have is what drives me and keeps me going. It’s what motivates me to do better and take on any challenge that we have as an organization.

If you view your job as a privilege, then you will be incredibly motivated, and motivation plus hard work makes you indispensable and rewarded.

I love Jason’s article because it reminds me of three years ago, when Avi gave me a unique opportunity and really took a chance on some kid with a hodgepodge of experience. In our first encounter, he made it very clear that I can help him “in the back office” but that I wasn’t “refined” enough to be in front of customers. Today, there are very few meetings he’ll go to without me.

I remember on my first trip with Avi, I had to do a demo during a presentation. Never have I been so nervous as that moment. There were a million things “out of my control” that could’ve gone wrong, and Avi told me very sternly, “don’t mess this up”. Internet connection, phone crashing, app crashing, projector not connecting, random bug. Endless. But I didn’t make an excuse, I made a plan. I had a first, second and third backup for every single thing that needed to happen, every situation accounted for, every box checked. It went well. It didn’t go as expected, but it went well — no one knew the difference (not even Avi :).

Stay ahead of the curve, make sure never to drop the ball and always exceed expectations.

Three years later, now that we’re a real company with real traction, real funding and truly incredible people, I can have that expectation for our entire team.

I’ve learned that in a growing company, you need to be constantly increasing your quality bar for talent or you’ll end up with not only a lot of mediocre people but also mediocre design, code, process, product and biz-dev.

The uniqueness of being a part of a rapidly growing startup is that as the company grows, you’ll either be leading and guiding or be guided and led. Either you’ll float to the top and run your department/team/organization, or the company will hire someone else to do it (and you’ll probably fall to the side, or worse).

Everyone we have and hire inspires our existing team to realize how awesome they are to have been able to bring on such a rockstar.

When I was dating my wife, someone told me a message along the lines that I should feel like she’s way too good for me, and she should feel the reciprocal back. There’s no marriage like the one to your team, who I probably spend more waking hours with than my incredible wife (my co-founder of life) and we have the same bar at Dispatch.

PS: We need designers, engineers and other amazing people. Email me.