Bye for now, not forever 🐟🔥

After nearly 7 months at Fishburners, I’m calling it quits.

The first Wed lunches at the new Wynyard location

It started with a phone call offering a trial at Fishburners, which I accepted on the first week of August. Uncertain of what I would expect, I took my first steps into the entrepreneurial abyss after a catastrophic 2017 (existential crisis; long story short, yea…)— and got hired by a startup within the first week (thankfully also funding my rent).

Working for a startup in Fishburners has been one of the most interesting experiences I have undertaken. And what better time join too. Murray Hurps was stepping aside for Annie Parker as interim CEO in very same week. My basic premise was that working in a startup would enable me to understand how things were run. Instead of endless, mindless meetings and time-wasting presentations — startups are in the business of ‘getting shit done’.

The thought of working for a startup always intrigued me. Get shit done. Its all so exciting in the world of startups. Maybe that’s why startups are so great taking on incumbent companies. The fact is that in a large company; there are multiple layers of management and bureaucracy and everything needs to get approved and processes put in place before any decisions can be executed. This means that everything tends to move at a glacial speed.

In my experience large companies are rarely good. And often, the bigger the company, the bigger the un-goodness. They are rarely good to their employees because they have more power. They are rarely good to society because they confuse what’s profitable with what’s best for people. They are rarely good for your career because any effort you put in gets averaged out and lumped in with everyone else or, at worst, gets unnoticed.

Startup teams are much smaller in size and this is their advantage. I worked to launch a startup from New Zealand in Sydney with one other person. Every member knows (or should know) what they are doing because in the early stages, a startup is entirely dependent on its early team members for survival. Each member has a large impact that on the startup’s direction; you work as hard as possible to make impossible possible. Because lean experiments need to be continuously run to test what works and what doesn’t, failure is more tolerated than in a big company.

By far, my favourite part of Fishburners is co-working. The community is very friendly and approachable and co-working means people are happy to say ‘hello’ as they are passing by. There’s just a fantastic vibe that most companies only can dream of. Its also great to just walk over and ask what other people are working on. Imagine the possible collaboration opportunities! Whoever thought of having BBQs every Thursday afternoon and entrepreneurs eating lunch together every Wednesday — what a fantastic idea to build community. For example; I met a guy who was interested in the same idea I was working on. We worked together on it for some time but unfortunately we eventually parted ways so he could do his own thing.

Workshops every Thursday. To those Fishies that gave talks every Thursday, props to you for doing so. Its not just about taking but giving. I think I learned more about SEO, cryptocurrencies, marketing, etc. than I could back in school. There are lot of things I don’t know in the world and I’m always committed to learning more.

Wednesday night talks by Fishburners alumni. These were fantastic and prove that making it as an entrepreneur can be achievable. Alexis Soulopoulos, founder of Mad Paws, was one of the highlights of the year, spoke on how he grew the community around his startup.

Friday night pitches. It was a bit scary doing one, but then you realise its not too bad and my pitch probably had more substance than Juciero. It always sweet to see guys like GoFar pitch and later end up on national telly. Lots of people tend to not pitch because their presentation never looks entirely perfect; done is better than perfect. I think I spent almost zero time on rehearsing but making sure that the stats and numbers were correct. Another reason why people don’t pitch is that they are worried that an audience member is going to steal their ideas — there’s no such thing as a million-dollar idea anyways.

I believe in Fishburners’ values strongly; but spending 7 months doing the same thing over and over again was not going to well. Building a startup, especially with little funding was terribly difficult (and lonesome). Its something that I expected once the initial honeymoon period was over. My biggest problem by was the lack of resources/money/team members/execution and getting the tech correct. Every entrepreneurial journey has its high and lows; definitely something to reflect on as you fight through The Struggle.

Cutting it short, I will be studying at Coder Academy to become a Full-Stack Developer. It doesn’t mean I’m giving up entirely on startups. All this means is that I will come out with a greater skill-set to join a startup. Maybe I will try to find some secrets left in the world in an attempt to build another one again.

Until then, thanks for the memories!