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.