A Million Little Pieces

It’s been way too long since I was in the thick of things at a very early stage startup. I’d forgotten how many things there are to do, fundamental things and strategic things. It’s like there are a million little Lego pieces strewn about the ground and it’s my job to pick them up, one by one, as fast as I can and build. Every night I go home feeling as if I’ve added thousands of blocks to my structure and stepping back I see that it’s not even close to being finished.

It’s exhausting, exhilarating and astounding all at the same time. It’s truly what I love about startups, but it’s not so easy. One thing I’m noticing this time is that I have the ability to pause and say, ok, it’s alright, I got a thousand things done today, and that’s damn good. Yeah, there are a 999,000 left to go, but that’s fine. I do what I can without crashing. I didn’t know that the first time around or at least I didn’t let it sit with me.

I know how incredibly talented I am at building companies from scratch. I just intuitively know what to do next. I probably should have left my last one years earlier and I would have already build 2 or 3 more in that time. But better to learn now than never.

One thing that I’ve done this time is trust my gut on my first hire. I just had a feeling about this kid being right. He’s only just graduated from school and has such an arsenal of skills under his belt, way more than I did at that age. We hadn’t really worked on that much together, but I just see something in him. We’re in the trenches together, I’m pretty sure he likes it as much as I do. I’m hopeful it continues to blossom; I think he can learn a lot from me and this role and I can exponentially accelerate construction. It’s quite satisfying.

All this and I haven’t even announced what I’m doing. Many people already know, but we’re still running under the radar; not for long. Big pieces have fallen into place in the past few weeks.

I came home exhausted the other night. My wife said hey, be careful what you wish for.