Get A New Car
Disclaimer: This post is not about cars. It’s about passion.
“Quitting doesn’t always mean ‘giving up.’ Sometimes it means having the integrity to admit that a plan you’ve invested time and energy into isn’t working. Having the strength to walk away means that you can begin to invest anew in something you do love. It’s worth the risk.”
― Tony Horton
Sometimes, your passion will persist, but your project will fail. If your project fails, you don’t necessarily need to abandon your underlying passion. It’s like driving. When your car stops running, you don’t give up on the prospect of driving again―you get a new car so you can get back on the road.
Stewart Butterfield is a well known name in the tech community. Butterfield cofounded Flickr, which was sold to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $35 million. In 2009, he started another company called Tiny Speck. The company’s vision was to create an immersive and constantly evolving virtual world game, accessible from any browser. He called it Glitch.
The team spent several years working on Glitch, but it never caught on with a mainstream audience. The game was shut down in 2012 due to a lack of traction. Butterfield and his team had spent nearly four years working on a failed project. It was a painful setback—but it wasn’t game over.
While working on Glitch, the team had built an internal productivity tool to streamline communication, and it was very good. Instead of shutting down Tiny Speck, Butterfield decided to refocus the company around the productivity tool. They would polish and retool their internal app for external distribution, selling it to other companies with a SAAS (Software as a Service) pricing model. They called the new product Slack. The early traction for Slack was outstanding. In 2014, the company (now also known as Slack) raised $42.8 million in a new round of funding from several top tier venture firms. Later that year, they raised another $120 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion.
Butterfield knew he had a passion for startups, and he knew that startups were tough. When his vehicle broke down, he didn’t stop driving. He took his broken car to the dump, got a new one (with far more horsepower), and slammed his foot back down on the gas pedal.
Citations
[1] Tony Horton, The Big Picture: 11 Laws That Will Change Your Life. (Harper Wave, 2014).
This post was adapted from The Connection Algorithm, my new book about taking risks, which hit #1 in the Entrepreneurship and Personal Success categories on Amazon a few days after it launched.
More About Me: http://www.jtev.me
