Am I crazy?
It’s the question that has circled my brain at 3am for the past 7 years.
Startups, at their core are matters of faith. Of believing and seeing where no one else does.
But what no one says outright: faith is lonely. It’s deeply personal and can’t be borrowed from anyone else, not even for a second.
It’s isolating. This business of blindly pushing forward against a thing only you can see.
When not only the outside world but the people that love you best start asking you to question.
Nico’s “Am I Wrong” has become my mental soundtrack.
Am I wrong for thinking out the box from where I stay?
Am I wrong for saying that I'll choose another way?
I ain't trying to do what everybody else doing
Just cause everybody doing what they all do
If one thing I know, how far would I grow?
I'm walking down this road of mine, this road that I call home
So where is that line between faith and folly? Some place between out believing everyone to that promised land and blindly dedicating your life to a losing cause.
The only signals I know to be true, that keep my company on the path, are my users, my runway, and my mirrors.
If people (however small a number it is) love what I’m building for them and are happy to pay me, and I can steadily/increasingly grow that number within my runway … well, then there is still a fighting chance. A chance to stay in this thing and figure out the outsized impact. And to keep me honest, I have a couple of my mentors/investors/friends who are my mirrors. Who don’t reflect the reality I project to them, but a colder, harsher reality stripped of my blind optimism.
But the truth is: it doesn’t matter where a founder is in their journey. There will always be a little voice asking: Am I crazy? Am I wrong about everything? Should I stop?
Btw, I’m a big fan of stopping when it’s necessary. When the data suggests the path you’re on isn’t going to take you to where you need to go. The thing is: it’s rarely a clear dead end, telling you to head back. The path will keep going. Taking you further and further from your actual goal, but giving you the comfortable illusion of progress. In these cases, stopping and restarting is an imperative.
I just listened to a podcast where Annie Duke talked through the merits of quitting and it was a refreshing take on the usual flavor of persistence. Persist if you have data to suggest you should persist. Otherwise quit. Have people around you who can also work with you to hold you accountable to this.
This has been the tale of my startup journey. Over and over again. Starting. Then stopping. Then starting again. And again.
But it’s hard in the doing. The level of conviction needed to quit climbing one mountain on the belief that it’s a local maxima just to start at the bottom of another mountain, believing IT to be the global maxima we’ve been in search of.
Herein lies the work of the early stage startup:
To pursue with utter conviction, judged by the honest yet harsh yardstick of users, a bold, gamechanging hypothesis.
To persist with faith, in the face of breathtaking odds.
But then: to make decisive calls should the numbers tell us so.
Faith is, I think, a founder’s ultimate superpower. It nourishes us, keeps us company in the dark hours of midnight, nudges us forward when nothing else will.
Faith is the light and love by which we toil.
The trick is in keeping this faith wholesome and whole, our shield against the world that doubts and disbelieves. Keeping our feet on the path but not letting it dictate the path. Leaving the carving of the path to the data. The metrics.
Lest faith become folly.