horsepigcow

I love this quote by Marc Andreessen found here on Tim Ferriss’ blog:

“First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?”

Yep. I’ve said it before…and pointed to other references. Startup entrepreneurship is one helluva rollercoaster.

I love rollercoasters and I always have. And not only the literal sense of the word. My mother used to accuse me of being manic depressive. Although I think that pathologizing it may be taking it a little far, I certainly am a person who experiences highs euphorically and lows despondently and very little in between. I’m a woman of extremes: I work hard, I play hard, I love hard, I hate hard…I don’t know how to ‘kind of’ think, feel or do anything. I’ve smoothed out the highs and lows a little bit as I’ve aged, but I’ll always be who I am.

The other day I was having a conversation with someone who brought up the fact that she had heard from several sources that they were concerned about my level of commitment to running my company because I “am always posting my runs to twitter.” Yes, I have become a little more than obsessed with running these days. It’s about the only thing that keeps me sane and even-keeled enough to function on my little rollercoaster. I also don’t have much of anything else going on. I live alone. I don’t have a partner/boyfriend (yes, I’ve tried, but that is short-lived at best and I’ve decided I can’t add that extra curricular stress to my life at this moment). I hardly have a social life (unless it involves my startup circle). My son is off and out in the world on his own. I have a dog, but he’s a pug so he spends 23 hours a day sleeping. Running is my outlet.

I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but running has helped my lizard brain evolve quite a bit. I used to chew my nails. It was a disgusting, nervous habit. About 2 months into training I stopped and I haven’t bit my nails once since then. Stress used to completely disable me. When faced with rejection, I would go into hiding for days. Since I’ve started running, my crisis coping skills have increased one hundred fold. I get over rejection in hours and even minutes. My thinking is clearer. My focus is stronger. My concentration levels have increased. I feel more creative. And I’m definitely more grounded in reality.

People talk about the runners high. I love it. It’s that one moment of my day where my brain goes into absolute zen state. I recently told my training partner I couldn’t talk during our sessions because that ‘downtime’ for my brain acts as a big recharge. It starts with a tingle, then a wave of something I can’t quite describe sweeps through my entire body. At those moments all I think about is how perfectly in flow my body is. Foot after foot, I fly. I no longer feel the ground beneath them. Every muscle is in alignment like a perfect orchestra. Right after I finish my run, my brain comes back online and it is fired up. I get my best ideas and clearest thoughts in the hours right after I finish.

I don’t feel that my running (and I run 3-5 times per week, not every day) interferes with my focus on running Shwowp. I feel that it helps me run Shwowp. I honestly don’t know if, with my history of manic depressive like mood swings, I could have gotten this far without running. I certainly know that it’s going to get me through everything else. Nothing seems impossible and no problem seems insurmountable when I finish a run.

Consequently, I look around me and see many CEO’s and startup founders running. I’ve also worked with many executives in high pressure companies who ran almost every day. Now I understand why and I understand how they handled the kinds of pressure they were under in stride….so to speak.

So, if you are one of the people who question my commitment to my company because I post my runs to Twitter, I hope I’ve explained how beneficial it is that I run. Also, you should be more concerned when I don’t get my runs in. Just recently as I was traveling in the cold and snow and couldn’t run, I started to panic a little more and feel a little more anxious again. And if it’s merely posting these runs to Twitter that poses the problem, I’d ask yourself, “What of the startup founders who don’t post anything?” At least you know how I’m spending my time 24/7. You should feel secure in my level of radical transparency.

[photo from Flickr Commons]

[photo of a many years ago Evan Prodromou by Peter Kaminski]

Just recently, Jolie O’Dell wrote a great post on what it really means to be an Entrepreneur in the midst of hundreds of people claiming to be entrepreneurs around her:

If you have no capital, no employees, and no product, but you DO have another job working for someone else (or if you’re a full-time college student), you’re not an entrepreneur.

O’Dell writes. I would say the same goes for the words ‘startup’ and the title of ‘CEO’.

I’m ashamed to say that, for many years, I’ve used both to describe the wrong thing. CEO of what? I was the sole employee (or there were two of us who were partners in the case of Citizen Agency). Sure, I managed projects, bringing together bright people who worked on great campaigns and products, but at the end of the day, we were all just a group of independent contractors temporarily coming together to create something that we usually didn’t have a huge stake in. There was little risk, just a lot of creativity. We assumed the fun role while the client assumed the risk.

There is no startup without a product. There is no CEO without assuming risk: for reputation, money, other people’s welfare (employees), answering to investors, etc. (all the things that O’Dell mentions in her list for entrepreneurs and more) I’m discovering rapidly that this type of work – having a startup and being in the real role of CEO is very different than anything I’ve done before.

Startup, I’m in love.

I love one minute knowing with intense certainty that what we are onto is something HUGE and will ultimately change the world, then the next minute wondering if I have delusions of grandeur and should be treated for Schizophrenia. But this is a common and desirable theme amongst founders (especially startup ones) I’m told. Either way, I’m happy and loving it and learning quite a bit about why leadership is not for everyone and is definitely important. Here are just a few things I’ve learnt in the past few weeks:

1. A leader sets the pace of an organization. When asked what I most love about my freelance lifestyle, I’d always say, “I can sleep in”. And I did. In fact, I banished the existence of alarm clocks from my life, only using the alarm on my mobile phone if I absolutely HAD to catch an early plane. No more. If I roll into the office late every day (if at all), others notice. Their pace matches mine. I’ve changed all of that. My alarm goes off at 6:30 am and I am up without hitting the snooze button right away. I aim to be the first person in the office every day. I should be.

2. A leader isn’t afraid to make unpopular decisions. I used to ask everyone else what they thought instead of making a real decision. I was afraid to decide anything that would impact someone else in a negative way. It made me popular and liked, but very ineffective. I’ve been making quite a few unpopular decisions and, guess what? Not everyone likes them, but the end result thusfar? So far, so good. Signing up for TechCrunch Disrupt and pushing the team towards launching there was one of them. Best decision ever. Completely nuts and unpopular.

3. A leader has to understand every part of the business. Every part. This one makes me cringe and whine. Every part? OMG I hate spreadsheets and those gawdawful buzzwords around funding (term sheets, run rate, valuation, etc)! My eyes glaze over when talking about hosting and technology infrastructure. I struggle with what is front end and back end. I love data, but am a little confused when it comes to database architecture. So. Much. To. Know. But I have to. I have to at least have a decent understanding of all of these things. I can’t show up to a meeting without answers. Playing dumb isn’t allowed. Leadership means I have a good sense of how all the moving parts of my business works, even if I don’t make them move myself. This will take a while.

4. A leader asks for help. I’ve always been pretty good at surrounding myself with strong people, but where I fall down is actually asking for help. I think a part of me is afraid that if I ask for help, it’ll signal I don’t know what I’m doing. Of course, I know that’s a backwards way to look at it and good leaders ask for help. It helps me learn what I need to learn (see previous point).

5. A leader knows when NOT to lead. You know the feeling – you think, “I’ll just do it myself. It’ll be easier and done right.” Well, that kind of attitude will send a strong signal to the team member in charge of that role that you don’t value their work. And there isn’t anything more demotivating than that. Being a DIY girl, I have to consciously NOT do this. It’s not about delegation, it’s about empowering people to take charge on their own. Sure, I may know lots about a certain area, but I also have to trust that my team mates know their stuff, too. And trust, well, that’s the biggest lesson of all.

There are more lessons than that to come. I’ve only been in this role for a short while. But I’m learning quickly and finding out that leaders DO lead, they just lead with a good balance of being IN the lead (as in setting the example or being knowledgeable) while getting out of the way to let others lead (as in asking for help and letting others take responsibility for their roles). And it isn’t always easy to figure out when to do what.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been a total basket case lately. There wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t have the thought:

“What was I thinking? I can’t do this.”

…go through my head. But lucky for me (and Shwowp) the thought that would instantly follow that one was:

“I can DO this! WE can do this!”

On August 26, 2010, I applied for Shwowp to participate in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. I saw someone post the event to Facebook and my instant thought was, “I would love us to be launching there.” I thought it didn’t hurt to apply, so I did. I told Cassandra and Jerome that I applied and that we had a slim chance of getting in, but that we should start working towards launch on that day anyway.

To give you a sense of how crazy this move was, let me tell you where we were at almost exactly a month ago. We had no front end design and pretty much nil on the front end development. The back end was well on it’s way to being set up, but on a saner schedule, it was probably about 6-8 weeks out. Our core technology, which you will see on Tuesday if you tune in, was designed-ish, but not tested and definitely not implemented.

Basically, we were probably at around 20% towards a launch and, once again in a sane – but fast paced – schedule, we would be launching in about 3 months or so.

I asked my team to compress that to ONE MONTH.

I didn’t know this, but they’ve now told me they were having conversations when I wasn’t there asking one another, “Is she freakin’ nuts?”

I am. I have to agree with them.

But here we are. We are sitting in the audience of TechCrunch Disrupt, watching the proceedings. We are up tomorrow afternoon at 3:30pm PT officially unveiling what we are doing with the world. I need to pinch myself. I’m excited and nervous all at once. We have a great demo, a great story and we believe strongly in what we are doing. It’s pretty awesome to be here.

I knew when I signed up with only a month to build, I was putting a huge amount of strain on the team. I didn’t know how we’d fare. I was concerned that we couldn’t manage it. We are a relatively new team. We’ve never worked together. Some of the members of the team, like William Hutter (designer in France), I *just* met. I’ve been part of stressful do-or-die startup launches before, but besides Cassandra, no one else in the team had the boiler room experience. When I mentioned long days, no sleep and high stress as being a necessary evil over the month, nobody looked like they were ready to sign up for such a task.

But they did. And wow. I’m blown away by this amazing (but small) team of fabulous people I work with. They pulled long hours. They went above and beyond taking this on. They made this dream their own. We worked like a real startup. Everyone was invested and committed. There were breakdowns, but when it was over, we’d pick ourselves up, exchange words of support (and sometimes hugs) and get right back on track.

I’m super proud of what we’ll be demo-ing tomorrow and launching in the next few weeks. I’m REALLY blown away that we are one of 25 startups presenting picked out of 1000+! And I feel super fortunate to work with Yanik (lead developer), William (designer/front end developer), Joy (Architect), Jerome (CTO & Co-founder) and Cassandra (COO & Co-founder). I could not think of a better, smarter, more talented, harder working group of people. Thank you for getting us here.