Mic Drop

In the summer of 2008, I went onto a vacation with my family to Hokkaido. And on that trip, something surprising happened: I had become the official, unpaid photographer of the trip after borrowing my uncle’s spanking new DSLR the entire time. Thus the kindle was lit and my interest in photography (particularly in cameras) spread like wildfire in my life. Since then I’ve amassed a collection of camera gears. Cameras, lenses, tripods, polarisers, I had them all.

In the end however, I realised that these things have no bearing on my photography. I thought that good cameras will give me good pictures, but in reality, what would give me good pictures is more practise, and not a faster aperture. And for the past 15 weeks, I feel that I’ve lived through that entire story again, except this time it has to do with startups and running a business.

Initially, business to me was no more than basic arithmetic; you put in some amount of effort and time, and you get some outcome and perhaps some money, and that the only reason why a business may not work out is because you haven’t jump far and high enough to reach the holy grail on the other side.

But as it turns out, business in 2017 was more like multiplication; you try out different things and tweak the factors until you’ve found a winning formula that could give you the maximum results with minimum investment.

With this approach, I learnt that it was important to take only the smallest steps that’s required to get some sort of validation, and move on. But the other part to this is that, because these steps are so small, you have to take many of them in order for them to add up to something. In the end, business is still arithmetic; the amount of effort and time you put in is the result that you could get out of it, but you have to do it in a clever way, and know how to break the bigger arithmetic problem down into many, smaller multiplication problems and work at them through trial and error.

I now wish that I had known all of this when I started taking pictures 9 years ago — that instead of wasting my time and money on fancy gears, I should have spend more time learning by taking many pictures in quick successions. Build, measure, learn!

The other part to Creative Founder has less to do with business, but arguably is just as important, if not even more important than knowing how to optimise your time and resources. And that is working effectively as a part of a team.

I had always known that working in a team is important, although years of cliché lectures and conversations about team work has rendered the concept somewhat dogmatic and redundant. In Creative Founder however, working in a team takes on a more structured approach: instead of simply working in a group, we tried to set out clear goals and divided our tasks according to our own role. As the only CFO in my group, there is a sense that all the numbers keeping is my territory, and that unless I take proactive actions to get it done, no one else will do it. By organising our roles this way, there’s less guesses around who should do what, and we simply take responsibility of what falls under each of our job titles.

Since Creative Founder might as well be counted for 2 studio classes, and considering the fact that my schedule only consisted of 4 classes this semester, the Creative Founder method has become a significant part of my modus operandi this fall — to very positive effects; I now sketch note instead of simply taking notes, I try to stay lean with my workflow so I can produce better work, and of course, 2 by 2s are now a standard for organising my tasks.

Ultimately, I’m not too sure if I want to be a founder. It just all seems a bit too stressful and I still need to live long enough to see the year 2100 (preferably on my own two legs). But regardless of whether or not I become a founder in the future, I think the methodologies of staying lean, and the lessons of working as part of an effective team, is something that will stay with me and create meaningful ripples throughout my life.