Tag: startup

The Impossible Tree

My apologies for the long time between posts. It’s not for lack of writing; in fact, it seems as if I’ve been doing nothing but. Position papers, emails, investment memos, thank you’s, meeting reports… Raising money for a company is not as easy as it’s made out to be. “The Valley,” as Silicon Valley supplicants like to refer to it, has its own unwritten rules about what or who is “in” or “out.” On both counts, my company and I are firmly on the out, which makes for lots and lots of explaining; all of it written in slightly pitchy (but never too effusive) language. All our graphs are up and to the right, as they say.

The joke I tell my co-workers is that pitching a hardware company to venture capitalists is like having Ebola and asking someone for a hug. In general, I’ve been okay with our contrarian little startup. What we’ve been trying to do: introduce something completely novel into a product area that has not changed in 50 years. This is a Sisyphean task far more significant than we could have imagined when we started. We didn’t choose our environment when we began—we just knew we had a cool idea and stuck with it. And stuck with it. We only learned how crazy we were to keep going after we had been at it far after most others would have given up. Ironically, in the hyper-growth mantra of modern business, the very fact that we’ve been around so long makes some investors think something must be wrong with us. Staying alive while being left for dead is its own way of life.

Down from my house, there’s a well-beaten path that runs parallel to an untroubled little creek. The trail is well maintained with steps on the slopes and even small ladders that help hikers surmount toppled redwoods. There’s one smallish redwood that fell in a storm years ago. Judging by its circumference, this sapling is about 30 years old; it spans the creek bed perfectly with enough room for any tall person to comfortably walk underneath. On my hikes on that trail, I reach up and touch the trunk as I pass beneath out of a little respect. This tree, despite its horizontal orientation, keeps growing.

The fallen tree is a study in impossibility. The tree was not engineered to bear its own weight this way—the branches in the middle will eventually grow big enough to snap the center bore. Not to mention the spanned bank eroding away and the whole woody thing crashing into some new dysfunctional shape. More than any tree around it, the simple function of it’s continued existence says infinity and finiteness simultaneously. Nothing about this tree says “living,” but there it is anyway defying its own viewpoint.

I get it. The tree doesn’t know any better. Give it a chance, and it’ll grow and do as well as it can; however it is planted. The tree does not care for inspiration, metaphors, symbolic hope, or the quick slap of my hand on its mossy bark as I path underneath. The tree wills its own thing no matter what orientation it finds itself in.

Circumstance, it seems, is not a reason for surrendering.

Of Sacrifices and Existentialism

Entrepreneurs face an existential dilemma every day that they are burning cash and looking for customers: should I shut the business down? There is quite a lot of life-death thinking going on in the head of a good founder all the time about the ongoing struggle to keep a company going. Running a startup is one part business plan, one part hustle, and two parts ongoing existential crisis. Leading one of these companies means being like the proverbial duck on a pond—the rest of the company sees you calmly floating along, but underneath you’re paddling like crazy.

A lot of startup folks talk about “keeping a company afloat” like it is a leaky boat we have to constantly bailout, but I prefer to think of these companies as starving children that always need food. Sometimes, some months, it’s a very close call. I lie awake at 3 am and wonder, “How am I going to make payroll this time?” Then, after that dark night, I put on my shoes, grab my bag and get an order. Revenue is like the elixir of life to these babies. Spoon a purchase order into the ever-hungry mouth, and the color returns to her cheeks. Suddenly, magically, payroll is next month’s problem. 

You make do. You go without salary for long periods. Vacations do not happen. You’d visit a customer and sleep in your car if you thought it would stretch the cash further (can’t say I’ve done that one, but I have thought seriously about it a few times. I did know one guy who slept in his motor home in the parking lot outside his office for years to make a go of it). You don’t hire cleaning people, but instead, clean the bathrooms yourself. Early mornings, before everyone gets in, are a great time to empty the trash. 

A CEO who empties trash is not exhibiting self-sacrificial, “above-and-beyond” effort. Thinking of your work as sacrifice implicitly creates an expectation of reward later on—it’s a form of debt. That’s bad business. The same goes for getting noticed as a reward—that’s taking credit, and credit is just another form of debt. Why saddle your company with unnecessary debt? Doing the work and calling it “sacrifice” means you don’t have the mindset; it means “you’re owed” something. A good entrepreneur does what it takes to move the company forward and keeps any judgment surrounding the type of work to himself. I see a lot of people who get caught in the trap of wanting to “be” a CEO or an EVP, but neglect the genuine (and vital) part of “doing something.” Wanting to “be someone” and “doing something” are usually mutually exclusive. If “being someone” means that buying office supplies in bulk at Costco is someone else’s “do,” then running startups is probably not for you. Instead, take your talents to Google—free food and massages!

The answer to the “do I shut it down” question is always another question: “what am I doing, right now?” When you can’t do anything else, and you are out of options, that’s the time to shut it down. Companies don’t deserve to keep going just because of the Herculean efforts of a CEO. Businesses don’t deserve success because VP’s fly coach and chose Motel 6’s over Hyatts. The verb “deserve” does not belong in the entrepreneur’s dictionary. The decision to shut down a company is usually self-evident. The decision to keep it going? That is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment series of acts. Sacrifice, however, is not one of them.