success is not a function
About four years ago I was working devilishly hard with my team, building a new version of a travel app called Wanderfly. I don’t recall specifically what I was working on at the time, only that I was in full-on “code mode.” For non-programmers, code mode is a sort of focused trance that programmers tend to assume; it’s like saying “in the zone.” Because of the number of things you need to keep track of in your head while coding, it can sometimes take 20–30 minutes to get into code mode, which is why programmers hate to be interrupted — it’s like building a house of cards in your mind, and even the most innocent notification or question can bring it all crashing down.
As with any early stage startup, we’d had our fair share of sudden crises, and we’d learned to expect them without warning from all angles. Investors pulling out, key employees quitting, servers crashing — these were all business as usual, so we had grown increasingly thick-skinned, with various coping mechanisms for each. But there was one place where I still thought that I could let my defenses down, one haven in which I thought I could just be myself without fear of repercussion: the Google Chrome console.
I won’t get into boring technical details here, but as any programmer will tell you, the console is your best friend. It tells you all kinds of useful information about what’s going on in your app and helps you become a better coder. It does exactly as it’s told, only talks back if you explicitly ask it to, and has no hidden agenda or sense of morality.
Or so I thought.
Because: would a truly helpful, amoral, non-judgmental computer program really drop an existential bomb like this on a poor unsuspecting coder?—
I. Think. Not.
The console had betrayed me. Apparently it too had been quietly watching, judging me all along, and just waiting for the right opportunity, the right moment to interject by surprise and cause me to question everything.
“‘Success is not a function?!’ WHAT THE FUCK is THAT supposed to mean?” I thought defensively, reeling from surprise. It stopped me dead in my tracks. My mental house of cards came crashing down, slid off the table straight into a shredder, whereupon the little paper bits were then catapulted onto a bonfire.
I passed from a state of optimal productivity to major existential crisis in about four seconds.
Code-wise it was a simple fix, but having addressed the technical side, I now had to grapple with attempting to interpret this cryptic lesson from the Internet gods.
A function is one of the fundamental building blocks in programming. It’s a routine which accomplishes something specific; a set of code that takes inputs, runs some operation, and returns some result. For instance, you might have a function that does simple addition, where you pass in two numbers, and the function hands you back their sum. Obviously functions can get much more complex, but the point is that a function always does the same thing; it’s predictable, guaranteed. You pass stuff in, it takes some predictable actions and gives you back a predictable result.
In that light — harsh as it may have been — I couldn’t help but acknowledge the deep truth here. I temporarily undid my fix and refreshed the browser again, just to have the opportunity to sit and gaze at that little red error message, as if meditating on a prayer. I even took a screenshot of it, a modern-day version of the pen-circled passage and accompanying triple-underlined “YES!!!” you inevitably find in the margins of worn college philosophy books owned by pre-Internet generations.
YES!!! Success is not a function. It is not something that can be prescribed, a guaranteed outcome given the right inputs. Surely we knew this on some level when we’d started our company; we didn’t really expect that simply taking the right initial steps would lead us down a frictionless storybook path happily ever after, but we did frequently find ourselves viewing the world in an overly binary way when it came to success and failure.
But this realization begged the question: if success is not a function, then what is it?
If it’s not a strictly logical routine which, given the right inputs, guarantees a certain outcome, then what kind of process is it? If it’s not an objective state, but rather a more subjective condition, then who is the arbiter of success or failure? Finally, if it’s not a static point, but rather a vector, a direction, then where’s the map that plots out the overall path that represents success, and where’s the little blue pulsing GPS dot that shows you whether you’re on it? Is there one?
Approaching it from this angle helped to contextualize and make sense of the roller coaster we’d been on over the last several years. There was always such pressure to characterize how we were doing in overly simplistic terms, a pressure stemming from the constant — and ultimately very unhealthy — comparisons that we’d draw to other startups based on superficial and incomplete information. We’d look at TechCrunch articles about newer entrants who had raised $6M right off the bat in their first round, and think, “Shit, we’re screwed, we failed to raise that much.” We’d receive the wistful shutdown notices from others who’d run out of steam and think, “Sweet, another one bites the dust and yet here we are, still alive and kicking!” There seemed to be an ever-increasing body of evidence on both sides of what sometimes felt like the court case of Wanderfly Success v Wanderfly Failure, with new arguments being mounted on a daily basis from both sides simultaneously.
But that’s just the thing: a startup, a company, an entire venture, is not a court case with a single binary outcome. There doesn’t need to be one prevailing side that wins out and renders the entire body of evidence to the contrary moot. Both sides, and everything in between, are real and true, because they are comprised not only of the objective and quantitative events that occur, but also the subjective and qualitative experiences of everyone involved, from founders and employees to investors to partners to users and customers.
And there it was. We were always succeeding AND we were always failing. THAT is the whole truth.
To get any more specific or decisive, I need a scope and a point in time. Six months after this console-prompted enlightening, was Wanderfly a success for me on the day we closed the deal on the profitable sale of my first startup? Abso-fucking-lutely. Another eight months after that, was it a success to our whole team and to the thousands of adoring users when the site got shut down? Most certainly not.
We started our company, like many tech founders these days, based on a product vision. We had an idea for something novel and useful in online travel, and we wanted to bring that idea into existence. That was it, the entirety of our initial goal, the whole impetus behind our founding moment. As we made some progress and got a glimpse of the prospective startup adventure, that became part of our success criteria too. We wanted to experience the full, prototypical startup lifecycle: dreaming, pitching, fundraising, team building, product development, launch, PR hype, traction, iteration, acquisition. The goals of achieving true mass scale, or of figuring out how to effectively monetize and grow into a sustainable business, gradually entered into the picture as a result of others’ outside influence. We adopted these goals as our own in order to garner the support and resources needed to move forward, and we pursued them in good faith, but on an emotional level I don’t think we ever fully internalized them as defining our success.
Success is not a function. It’s an attitude, a direction, an organic and unpredictable process, a belief, a feeling. It changes like the weather, and the question of whether or not one is achieving success can only be truly determined by matching a self-awareness of one’s own goals and expectations with a candid and pragmatic assessment of one’s own realities and capacities. It’s highly subjective and variable, and depends on both the person and on the point in time. Probably depends on levels of sleep deprivation, blood sugar and caffeination too, from my experience.
Success is not a function. Success and failure are not at war with one another in a mutually exclusive epic legal battle, but rather inextricably intertwined in a lively karmic tango. Any seemingly unequivocal success from one perspective at one point in time will soon be paired with a seemingly show-stopping failure from another perspective or another point in time, and vice versa.
F. Scott Fitzgerald says, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In that case, I suggest that the test of a first-rate entrepreneur is the ability to live two seemingly opposed realities — success and failure — at the same time, and to not merely retain the ability to function, but to actually thrive on the experience instead of having a nervous breakdown.
I pondered all of this quietly for 15 minutes or so, fixating on the imparted wisdom from the console with a steady, blank stare — which, incidentally, is virtually indistinguishable from the process of actually coding. Then I remembered I had a product to build, and I got back to work.
