Editor’s Notes: In this post the CEO talks about the pervasive narrative of overnight success, Invisible’s Journey to Success; the people that stayed after a fallout, Fear, Sacrifices. ‘’We were a rocket ship, then we crashed. There was a huge crisis and fallout.”

Friday, 23 November 2018

A journey through hell.

It was odd seeing my own company in the press last month. After three years, we finally came out of stealth and announced all capital raised to date. I did a series of interviews that turned into articles like this. Family, friends and contacts sent in waves of congratulations.

And the irony. The severe irony of it all.

There’s the illusion of overnight success. With starry eyes, people congratulated me on my “new venture,” only to find out that it’s the same one we’ve been working on for three years. Yes, the one they ignored. But now that it’s in the press, it looms so large to them — they can finally see it. A singularly distasteful attribute of human nature is our hierarchically-selective vision.

This overnight success narrative is so strong, that people who already knew that we’d closed a round thought we’d raised more. And everyone assumes all the cash closed yesterday, instead of months ago, or at some point over the last three years. Startups that come out of stealth announce everything raised to date. And they usually make these announcements months after the actual close.

Then there are the fast followers, chasing that overnight success. The round is closed, so suddenly, investors come out of the woodworks that want to invest. “Is it too late to invest?” As soon as it is clear that the price has gone up, they fade. There’s the hiring version of this: people reached out to me to say “Now that you’ve got money, perhaps we can explore working together again.” They, too, fade as soon as it is clear that our compensation model hasn’t changed. If building companies has taught me anything, it is respect for the courage of leaders and disdain for the cowardice of followers.

The technology press is full of fake news. They deliberately create this narrative of celebrity entrepreneurs raising millions, rapidly building huge companies. It’s a FOMO-factory.

I resent it so much that I’ve avoided my own industry’s press. I haven’t read TechCrunch or any of the other publications since I became an entrepreneur. Perhaps to my detriment, in that I’ve denied myself information. And for what? A visceral reaction of disgust? Perhaps this says more about what’s wrong with me, than what’s wrong with the press. Perhaps I’m more envious than I’d like to admit.

But I hate these overnight success stories. Not only it’s sloppy journalism, it’s machine-journalism and clickbait. And worse: it’s a symptom of cultural psychosis.

We WANT to believe that success is easy. We want celebrities. We want celebrities to believe what we believe, to uphold our values, to be our role models. But we also want them to tell us how we, too, can be just like them. They rule over us, and we resent them for it, but we are secretly glad that they’ve relieved us of the burden. We want to believe that they just got lucky, and aren’t actually any better than us. We feel just as entitled to their success as we feel to our comfort: we deserve our market pay and benefits and their equity. And then, when something goes wrong, we want a scapegoat to lynch.

The pervasive narrative of overnight success reinforces these desires in our collective unconscious. Why do I hate these desires so much? Why do I hate these stories so much?

Because success isn’t easy, it’s hard! Because if I told you how I did it, you wouldn’t want to know. And as badly as you want it, you wouldn’t do what it takes — because it would be too hard, too risky, and too weird. Because the beliefs that got me here aren’t your beliefs, and the values that got me here aren’t your values, and my role models aren’t your role models. Because the rain of luck falls on everyone, but very few know how to build a damn well to capture it, and a canal system to distribute it. Because success begins with forsaking entitlement to anything you didn’t earn yourself. Because when something goes wrong, an entrepreneur has no scapegoat to lynch.

I am not successful yet. Far from it. My company isn’t profitable. We haven’t raised a Series A. But whatever small successes I have had at any point in my life came from hard work, sacrifice, struggle, risk-taking, stress, learning, and persistence.

That’s why I hate overnight success stories. They are lies, damned lies; Scylla and Charybdis, the very sirens of destruction! If I believed them, my ship would dash against the rocks. I’ve stopped my ears with the wax of common sense: success is hard.

How ironic, then, that I woke recently to find myself, somehow cast as the hero-of-the-day in this perverse overnight success myth. It’s as nightmarish as it is dreamlike. Now I’m the one on the magazine, but the magazine is selling the same damn lies.

There’s a short-lived halo effect, that I relished, and I relished smashing. If you don’t follow me on Facebook, you don’t know yet about how I commit social suicide. Every day. About three times before breakfast. I say polarizing things. I expose myself in various ways. I’m a nudist in the nudity that counts.

In a society that worships success, that makes the successful godlike, it is dangerous to be perceived as successful. People look up to you as an example, as a role model. If you accept this role, you have to appear to possess knowledge and wisdom. (Not real knowledge and wisdom, but popular knowledge and wisdom: the type they sell in bookstores.) You have to know what to do, to know what to say, to be in sync with the times. To be very… Obama. I can’t think of a better example of the archetypal leader that millennials, and urban elite society in general, wants than Obama. I see many CEOs who are little Obamas. And it seems to work for them. They seem to be rewarded for it. There’s strong reinforcement. They’re very attuned and aligned with the zeitgeist. They read the books they are supposed to read. Say the things they are supposed to say. Like they are method acting.

If you reject this Obama-CEO role, you’re perceived as “part of the problem” in tech, one of the unenlightened leaders that makes this industry disreputable. I’m the farthest thing from a frat-boy CEO, so I find this amusing. And ironically enlightening: because I think that, if anything, the technology industry is too enlightened, and that a lot of its problems come from its messianic pretensions. Enlightened techies talk about “expanding consciousness:” they build companies that are miniature progressive utopias, and products that advance their vision of progressive utopia writ-large.

As much as I find it amusing, I also find it alarming. I’ve got different beliefs, different values, a different culture, a different vision. So I’m the perfect target for social policing, for the brutal ritual of ostracism and public shaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up one day with a PR crisis on my hands, somehow looped into the #metoo movement, (or one of its successors in the art of public lynching), because our ratios are off, or someone said something uncouth, or something of that nature. But the real reason will be that I did not render obeisance to the progressive idols.

That’s why, for the last year, I’ve been intentionally taking unpopular positions in the public record. I figure that if I pre-emptively defend myself, I can preserve my independence, and I don’t have to be fake like everyone else. Truth is unpopular. Success is hard. Truth isn’t popular for many of the same reasons that success isn’t easy.

Success is hard. How hard? It’s a journey through hell.

“A journey undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full.”
— Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

In bullets, here’s the story.

1. Invisible began in October 2015 as a $10K/m virtual Chief of Staff service for CEOs only, selling many human assistants through a bot.
2. 5 clients signed up, with more on the waitlist. Raised $500K in angel capital. Hired a team of 20+ SF-based assistants.
3. We were a rocket ship for six months, then crashed because we couldn’t supply the demand. It cost $20K/m to support each client.
4. With runway shrinking and investor interest drying up, we gave our team and clients notice.
5. Most former team members left gracefully. Although we gave many warnings leading up to our last payroll, several team members that stayed longer threatened to sue when we didn’t pay. One went rogue and deleted company data. Thankfully the data was eventually recovered.
6. Ultimately, six team members were crazy enough to stay.
7. And one client paid us $100K upfront for another year of service.
8. During that year, we discovered solutions to the problems we ran into in the first six months.
   — We discovered how to design “Processes” of step-by-step instructions to efficiently execute repetitive digital work.
   — We discovered how to hire and train our own labor network of “Agents” to execute Processes cost effectively.
   — We discovered how to build a “Digital Assembly Line” to guide Agents to execute Processes 24/7.
   — And much, much more!
9. To cover our cost of living, we took turns taking consulting contracts, but split the income evenly as a team.
10. Invisible re-launched in September 2017 as a $10/hr Process Assistant, selling many human assistants through a bot.
11. Over the next year, the service quickly grew to 200 client companies.
12. Today, the company has 100 partners and agents, and just announced an additional $2.1M in new funding, taking the total raised to date to $2.6M.
13. While bootstrapping, we carried $100K of debt to the original team, which we proudly repaid in December 2017.

In summary, we were a rocket ship, then we crashed. There was a huge crisis and fallout. Miraculously, six team members and one client stayed. For over a year, we went on a “journey through hell” to rebuild the company, and bootstrap to make ends meet, all while carrying debt. And miraculously, we emerged from a year of bootstrapping with a new product and a new business model. Miraculously, it worked, clients needed it and we grew. Miraculously, we were able to raise money, repay our debt, and are now on our way to profitability and scale, with a 100 person company, saving 200 clients thousands of hours a month.

It’s an incredible story, and even though I lived it, I still can hardly believe it. I have many, many product, business and leadership reflections on this experience. But I think the personal experience of the entrepreneur gets the least ink, because it speaks the language of mythos instead of logos. Everyone knows that entrepreneurship is full of struggle and suffering, but we’re shy to talk about what that is actually like, and to share what gets us through and keeps us going. So, for what it’s worth, here are a few of my personal reflections on the “journey through hell” experience:

— Startups are romantic. Don’t do it for the cash. Don’t do it for the equity, even. There is no business argument compelling enough to justify the risk. The only way to explain such foolish risk-taking is that it is romantic in nature. It has to do with who you are and what you believe and what you feel you must do with your life.

— Crisis tests character. The darkness is so dark. In retrospect, this story seems to have a happy ending. But in the darkest moments, I’m not sure what got me through. I’m not sure why my team stayed with me. I’m not sure why our clients didn’t leave. We sucked then, and we still aren’t even close to good enough today. But somehow, miraculously, we survived; we pulled through. Again, it was our romanticism that saved us. We believed. Philosophy helped: we were philosophy geeks and during that year of bootstrapping, every week we talked for hours about how philosophy informed our vision and strategy for Invisible. But philosophy without romanticism and a warrior spirit would not have endured. So that is what we look for when we hire today: Romantic (cares about beauty and love), Philosopher (cares about truth), Warrior-Capitalists (cares about applying these ideas and values in the struggle and mess of the real world). We call them Romantic Capitalists, or Applied Philosophers for short.

— Every crisis has both its lessons and rewards. Blake describes this life as a “realm of joy and sorrow mix’d.” You cannot have joy without sorrow. Synonymously, there is the cliche that you cannot have success without failure. But, in practice, it seems to be that the decision to succeed is a decision to fail. That if you pray for success, you are praying for failure also. That the real decision is not about direction up or down, but about amplitude: both up and down. In manic moments of joy and strength, I say “yes” to the price. But in the darkness, I regret and wonder if perhaps it would have been wiser to pray for neither; to pray for comfort, instead of glory. When crisis strikes, when bad things happen, when the dream becomes a nightmare, when the epic becomes a tragedy — these moments are extremely bleak; there is no guaranteed reward for the pain you’re going through, and the path forward is full of uncertainty. Cliche philosophy quotes and recycled religious dogmas will not save you; there are no easy answers, ready-made. Reading great books helps. Conversations with wise friends helps. But the only truths that will heal you are the ones that you arrive at; and the only way to arrive at them yourself is to keep going, through the confusion of the labyrinth, through the tangled web of your thoughts, through the painful knot of your feelings… Truths that are lived as much as thought. Somehow you find your path, a measure of serenity, and a sixth sense, an intuition, an ear for guidance. If you follow that messy narrow path of struggle, with a pure heart, eventually the crisis reveals its lessons and rewards. It may seem cruel, unjust and unfixable for a long time. Redemption, healing and a happy ending may seem impossible. But someday you may look back and be truly, deeply grateful for it. You may see that life had a bigger and better and wiser plan for you than you had for yourself, and that you’re a better person for it. You may be glad you didn’t get the things you thought you wanted, because you got the things you truly wanted. Like Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov, you may begin by cursing your bad luck, but like Alyosha, in the end, you may conclude that even the sorrows were necessary chapters in a more beautiful story than you could have imagined, that you wouldn’t trade for any other… and you will bless your past suffering with a tov, tov: this, too, was a good thing. Even if you cannot believe, even if you have almost no hope left, you must have faith: even a mustard seed of faith, of hope against hope, will keep you going — and it may amaze you what miracles are born of that faith. “Love cannot hurt what it cannot also heal.”

—Be yourself now, not later. Say what you think now, not later. Be aggressive now, not later. If you don’t use your freedom of speech and thought now, you’ll lose them. Not because of any law, but because of a prison of your own making. You’ll have made yourself out to be someone different than you are. Someone more polished. Someone less opinionated. Someone more agreeable. Someone more normal. What a shame. You’ll have imprisoned yourself. Everyone will be upset if you suddenly change. They’ll feel that you sold them a lie: and they’d be right about that. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that money and power will give you freedom. If anything, freedom may give you money and power, but the opposite is never true. You already have freedom. You were born with it. L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Freedom has been protected in this country since 1776. But freedom is rarely used. It’s a grave mistake to confuse the protection of freedom and the expression of freedom. The expression of freedom is the only reason why the protection of freedom is worthwhile. Express yourself, as you are. Not as society wishes you to be. If you are going to succeed, it will be because of your ideas, your thoughts, your words, your vision — fully expressed. Do not hide. That is a false humility. A fool’s humility. If expressing yourself is arrogance, be arrogant. But above all, do not turn yourself into yet another actor, yet another politician, playing some role for an audience. And if you haven’t yet, read Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance. It’s a good old kick-in-the-pants; it’s the most American thing ever — the old America, the America that time forgot.

— Fear is paralyzing. Don’t let fear rob you of your joy and your power. Fear, stress, mistakes, and depression are inevitable. Endure. Thucydides said the virtue of Pericles was that when the people of Athens were overconfident, he would sober them; and when they were depressed, he would give them hope. I wish I was like that. But I’m not. Fear is full of information, and I am very sensitive to it. It tells many truths and many lies. It can be paralyzing. I have to listen to other voices, too. I listen to the voices of serenity, and hope, too. Creative people should, perhaps, be more optimistic than realistic; more oriented to the future and its possibilities, than the present and its realities. But the best of all would be to somehow manage both. It is just emotionally difficult. Quite a stretch. Churchill was the best yogi of all.

— There are people crazy enough to do it with you. Sell the sacrifice. This is perhaps the most sacred miracle of leadership. I’ve asked more from my team than I had any right to ask. They were always free to leave. But they stayed, and they did what was necessary. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the feeling that I was dragging them through… well, hell. Simon Bolivar asked his people to cross the Andes, barefoot, in the middle of winter, so they could defeat the Spanish. Many people died in the crossing. I don’t know how he lived with himself. I feel tremendous guilt about the sacrifices my team has made because of my decisions. And I can only hope that, in the end, they will be rewarded. But there is no guarantee. So you have to sell the sacrifice. Don’t sell the reward. Tell them how hard it will be. How severely challenging it will be. And most people will leave. Most people will decline. But there will be those that are crazy enough to do it with you. Those are your true brothers and sisters. Trust that they are out there. Send word. A signal. Someone will answer the call.