The Scorch Trials: Surviving Tech’s Wilderness.
“It was meant to be a shortcut”.
Was the thought that went through my 7-year-old mind as I traversed the orange sands and ruined lands under the glaring 30+ degree of the Nigerian sun. Quite how I’d found myself lost is another story in and of itself, but let’s just say I had no business walking from one town to another just to see an old school friend at that age. Concerned I had already disappeared all day and may not make it back home in time before the sun went down, I decided to take another path, which left me walking through the outskirts of the city to get back home. Not quite a desert, but vast and expansive enough for the legs of this little middle-class African kid to feel like it was. With the suppressive heat bearing on top of me and my movements by the birds in the sky like an Orwellian regime, with a state of dehydration heightened by previous hours of endless playing outside (remember when kids did that?), a level of panic slowly crept upon me as the reality of my situation became a lot clearer to my naïve mind.
I made it home but not before the sun had set, and after going AWOL for almost 12 hours in the days of no mobile phones, to say my parents weren’t impressed would be an understatement. Only later in life did I understand the true danger I was in; from the physical threat of dehydration and being lost wondering a no-man’s land, to risk of kidnapping and all other nightmares. At that point, I swore I wouldn’t find myself in such a position again. Of course, I did find myself in a situation of being lost and trying to survive many years later, but of a different kind.
The Tech Wilderness…
It’s the break of the first session of Capital Enterprise’s Greenlight program, and as is often customary and polite to do, I decided to make myself well acquainted with all the new recruits to enter the seed-stage program. What became clear, as I introduced myself to other tech start ups was just how long we’d been “lost” for. Almost every start up I met had been going on for on average of 6 months to a year to get to the stage we were in now. With each new conversation, I became increasingly embarrassed and sheepish of my answer to the question of how long we’d been going on for.
6 years is the answer. Well, technically 8 if you count idea to conception.
The next response became quite predictable….”why so long?” many asked with a slight bemusement on their faces, and in truth it’s only in recently I’ve made sense of the answers to that. It’s not unusual for tech start ups to enter “The Wilderness”, where their version of the Maze Runner’s Scorch Trials begins. Some tech companies come through it quicker than others, some never even have to enter it all. Most, sadly, die during the Scorch Trials. Everyone knows about the infamous “90% of start-ups fail within the first 2 years” or so, and there are many reasons for their death. Most are attributed to just bad business decisions, which is usually the case most of the time, sometimes there are things purely circumstantial that lead to that time in the wilderness. It’s not always due to a bad business that a start-up fails, it can be everything circumstantial; from running out of time, money, lack of resources, connections, to just sheer timing. For us a few years back, being an early-stage B2B hardware & SaaS sports technology start up in London was just all kinds of “No” in a land of B2C Software-only investments. Sometimes such restrictions force you into The Wilderness to find new lands, a land of milk and honey…or just money. And once you’re out there in the wilderness, it’s oh-so easy to be lost, drifting through the ruins of other dead Start-ups, hoping to find a well, or even better, some sight of the proverbial promised land.
In the beginning it felt like it was all a dream (but did I used to read “Word Up” magazine?), first with winning a business competition at my university in 2012 and then following it up with a European competition final in Finland and then Runner’s Up at the European Satellite Navigation competition. Everything seemed to be coming up Millhouse. We had local media interests, support, and even the most valuable commodity of all; social media follows and likes. What could possibly go wrong?” Ironically, I remember me saying those exact words the night before finding out a death would affect an initial member of the original development team. That situation would put the entire project on hiatus for 18 months, and then later came to realise certain wrong decisions were made during that period, decisions that would further plunge the company deeper into the wilderness, with funds pretty much gone and a company on the brink of existence. Within 6 years we had experienced everything from a lightning strike destroying our first prototype and equipment (the first setback, in hindsight seemed more like a sign of what was to come) to unscrupulous investors hoping to take 90% of the company after finding out I was surviving on 2 slices of bread to get through a day. We’ve had blackmailing contractors holding us to ransom, a situation I still find somewhat bemusing and amusing the more I think about it, to finding out the first version of our app was actually just a UI shell with no code behind it (it was then I understood the importance of having a CTO). It got to a point that I would wake up expecting a locust plague of biblical proportions to sweep through London, seemed only fitting. For more on how all of this can affect one’s mental health, you can read my other blog on the subject matter here; https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/darkness-mental-health-startup-alexander-oviawe/
Still, I can’t cry “woe is me” all the time, as some of the choices to enter the wilderness was of my own doing. Just as that lost 7-year-old wondering through no-mans land, a large reason for how I ended up there was due to my inability to ask for help, to always wanting to do things my own way. Even as a kid, I’ve never been fond of reaching out for help or “kissing up” to people as I saw it, as I always felt I should be judged on what I do and the qualities of my abilities and work, not on who I knew. For that reason, I’ve always had a penchant for picking the hard road for everything. During internships rather than spending time buddying up to the bosses as other would, I utterly refused to, instead believing I would be judged on the value of my work instead. In some doses, it’s probably a good thing, but too much and it becomes pride. And in many ways, it was pride that set me off into wilderness, as I was determined to do things the “right way”, whatever that is. Seems I’ve always associated the “right way” as “the hard way”.
Then of course even when I did ask for help, I couldn’t bring myself to ask for exactly what I needed, but always asked below. Probably just a product of my environment. You get used to doing so much with so little, you can’t possibly imagine having access to more. I liken it to stories of my old boxing coach, who had spent many years in prison (glimpse into my world here), and whenever we would go away for a training camp, no matter how big of a room he had, he would also live in the smallest corner of it, with the smallest part of the bed. He’d done it for so long, I guess he just couldn’t deal with having more.
The Promised Land.
In all honesty, I’m still not quite sure how we survived our scorch trials, or if we have at all. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. But as I sit and reflect on the last few years, I’ve come to realise that though that time in the scorched trials was quite a humbling experience, I’m grateful for it. Sure nobody wants to spend 6 or so years in early-stage product development, which is hard as it is, but then on top you have to figure out ways to pivot and develop the product to stay relevant, because the world outside the desert doesn’t stand still. Last thing you want is to come out on the other side to a world you don’t even recognise and has left you and your idea behind. But I look back on the last few years, not with a sense of dismay, sorrow, pity or even shame, but of pride. Very few survive the scorch trails, yet somehow, we did. Sure, we were pressed, burnt and dehydrated, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing beats will that’s been forged in the desert, where you push forward not for dreams of riches, for quests of gold and wealth, but you push forward based on the most primal of human endeavours; to survive. If there’s one thing the last 6 years has thought me is how to survive; to survive when all seems lost, to figure out a way to survive when it seems there’s no viable way to do so.
Plus the scorch trials is usually the middle story. Let’s see how the third in the trilogy works out.
Disclaimer: I am in no way sponsored to promote the Maze Runner series. In fact I don’t even like it all that much.
