The Road to “Starting Up”
The unspoken path to even getting to the point of consideration to start a company.
The common perception of starting a startup to someone removed from the industry looks a bit like this. Three people (often white and male) figure out this cool niche in their world and build a tool that becomes massively popular and helpful and they start a company. It's not very difficult, happens very fast, and somehow all the pieces seem to be set.
Well, that’s wrong. It’s hard. It takes a long long time. And most importantly those pieces are rarely just in the right place, they are put in the right place.
Your World
What does the world look like to you? Is it round? Is it a cold, dog eats dog world like that of Game of Thrones? Or does it look like a timelapse of Broadway in New York?
Whatever that answer is, that’s your perspective on the world and surely there is some nugget to your vision that you uniquely can see. The better you get at spotting those nuggets and questioning your world, the better at leveraging and taking advantage of them you will get.
Let’s say your day consists of you unlocking your U-Lock at 5:48 am at 92nd & 3rd in New York. You hop on your bike and are heading over to Central Park when a squirrel jumps over and you stop to a halt. That U-Lock you chuck into your pack every day had just slammed into your back and bruised it.
Understandably you are in pain but you ride over to Central Park and begin to wonder why we carry bike locks in the first place. What if the lock was just part of the bike?
Boom.
Now you are thinking, now if you can just apply this same model of analysis throughout your life, new things will appear. This is the start of the road to starting up. From here, getting the right people, skills, and resources becomes 1000x easier.
Your People
I strongly believe the most important thing in life is the people who are in it. Who you work with, who you sleep with, who you see on the street every other day, who serves you your coffee, who your friends are, the list goes on.
Using the same curiosity dissecting the people around us and how they behave can lend huge dividends if leveraged well. I’m currently reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, which I highly recommend you pick up and read if you haven’t already.
The book largely serves as a good guide behind human social and business interaction and I won’t repeat his words here as I feel he explains them best, but one observation I have gotten from my own experienced and is blasted throughout the book is how to manage your network.
This doesn’t mean optimizing who you have on your LinkedIn but rather thinking carefully about who you devote time to and who you need to meet. Social circles are a lie, they are a lot less like circles and more like tangled headphones. The most important skill I’ve tried to develop is untangling those headphones and in a sense “upgrading” them.
What do I mean by this? First, start to establish a clear picture of what your connections look like. I like looking at how often I message certain people (the order they are on my iMessage list helps a ton), where I would rank them in my head, and my phone favorites list.
The better you understand who you like and spend time with, the easier growing that circle will be and you might be able to spend your time a bit better.
How does that apply to startups? That circle, those people you add in your life will help you tremendously. If you’re an engineer realizing what types of engineers are good and you like spending time with will help you learn who you would want to have on your team. Meeting and filtering out which great non-technical folk are out there will again pay dividends when your world gives you a problem you feel like solving.
Your Lifestyle
That brings me to your lifestyle. You might like living in your trendy SOMA apartment, biking down to Market & 9th and hammering out code like crazy for our buddy Travis. But you love riding bikes and after moving from NYC, the first week in SF your bike got stolen. So back to carrying that dreaded U-Lock in your backpack.
You decide to analyze what you’re getting out of life. What you’re doing in this world and decide its time for a change. You go to your great future team members and tell them what you discovered and you go build the iPhone of bikes. This is around where the story for a startup begins, but it’s not possible with the actions carried out before.
Whether or not you want to found a company I think those are two lessons that show the power of analyzing your life. I could write many more examples of how you can game your life make starting a company really easy. My final point is craft your life in such a way that you can because it’s a better life and come founding time, the tools are there.
I would love to hear what you think about this approach to life. Reach out!
Daniel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Bond Labs, Inc. Bond connects you with the people you should know and will be introducing you to great people later this year.
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Catch me on Twitter at @danielsing3r or Instagram at @danielsinger.
