Starting Up (or Start Upping?)
December 13th, 2006 RachelThe other night, it was late and I was still on my computer. Typing away at 2:15pm [oops. turn that ‘pm’ into an ‘am’ and you’ll understand what I mean a tad more…thank you blog elf. :)], a friend and fellow startup-er skyped me. I was surprised, to say the least. He was writing from Tennessee. So for him, it was 5:15am.
Nary a complaint, and a very evident amount of drive and determination to build his product properly and work until he was happy with the direction it is going. I see this, and I understand this, because this is simply what it takes to live day to day in this world. Not necessarily staying up so late that you’re more concerned with getting a shower in before an early morning meeting than you are with actual sleep, but the ‘get your hands dirty’, ‘do what you need to do’ mentality simply has to be there. Or you’ll hate it.
On the opposite side, I can remember a friend a few years back who had just started working in a midsize company that was growing to become quite a large size company — they’d gone from ‘mom and pop’ (a startup’s brother) to national leader with several franchises opening up that year. He’s a nine-to-fiver. Drive in…work, work…eat lunch….work….water cooler chit-chat…work…drive home. One tirade in particular at how awful and ridiculous it was for people to have blackberries that they answer off hours (”It puts unfair extra pressure on the REST of us!!!”) stands out in my mind.
He’d cut off his pinkie toe with a plastic knife before working in a startup.
You have to live it.
When it’s no longer about the job, the hours, the benefits, the tasks, etc…you know you’re going to put in the extra time. This applies to a move to Silicon Valley to head up the Product Management department of the latest video-social networking-tagging-rss enabled-blog/community/web application. It also applies to opening up a specialty tea shop in the middle of town. It could mean grabbing three of your best, most talented friends, putting your heads together, and investing your time/energy/extra cash into an idea you dreamed up one night. They’re all one in the same — to make it happen, it takes a conscious decision to truly dedicate yourself to living and breathing every minute of the entire experience/process. There is no, “That’s not in my job description” in a startup, of any kind.
You can’t hide.
Why would I hide? You say. Well, there are a lot of people out there hiding. Biding their time, day in and day out…counting the hours until they can clock out for the night. Sorry, this isn’t going to work here. Even a startup that’s reached 100 or so people is hard to hide in. You may last for a while, but you won’t last forever. The stakes are too high and you’re surrounded by too many people who are putting their heart and soul into the company.
Yes, being in a startup is fun. For us, we’ve got a fantastic technology that’s sitting right there just waiting to be understood and fully appreciated by the masses. We’re like flippin’ racehorses grinding our teeth at the starting gate sometimes…agitated that there aren’t more hours in the day because man oh man is it gratifying to be a part of something so wickedly cool.
To use the tea example again — it’s your store…your inventory…your responsibility to get customers to come in, buy something, and come back. That’s pressure. And that’s not something that you can just shuffle onto the other side of your desk before going to get (another) cup of coffee and chatting with a co-worker. The fun and the work can’t get in the way of each other, and hopefully they are at least sometimes one and the same.
So, to every person out there who’s busting their ass to breathe in every second of the startup life – I hear you, and I respect you. And to every person who smartly knew themselves well enough to steer clear of anything with “start” or “up” in the name or description of their current place of employment, a big pat on the back to you too.
