Doing Chores
It’s really strange. It seems like every start-up CEO I meet lately is sitting on a nice little war-chest of cash. Flush from a recent A-round, or having just cashed in their freshly-vested Amazon stock options (at a strike-price that would make a grown man cry, no less), all seem extremely enthusiastic about their latest venture (as they should) and — oddly — seemingly unconcerned with how they’re actually going to make money as a company. Sure - I know making money is in each of their business plans. But it’s not currently a necessity. They have cash to operate. They have freedom.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t begrudge any of them one iota. I wish them the best of luck. And I fully believe that within the next two to three months (or four), we’ll be sitting pretty right beside them, having attracted the right investor(s) who believe as much in our vision for Bluyah as we do. But all of that good will and optimism about our own future doesn’t change the fact that recently I’ve been feeling …. well …. a bit “stuck.”
Watching my boys play outside this evening, it finally dawned on me exactly what I’ve been feeling “stuck” about.
You can play after your chores are done
From the first through the third grade, we lived next-door to a family with 8 children. Their 4-bedroom house sat on about 2 acres of property right in the middle of a subdivision of smaller houses on quarter-acre plots. The family grew all of their own food in a massive garden, had chickens for their eggs, a cow for milk, and a pig — I’m not making this up — named “Bacon.” Needless to say, the family was a bit of an oddity in the community. And the middle son, Alan — who happened to be my age — was my best friend.
Every day after school a gang of us would tear home on our bikes, check in with our mother’s, then disappear into the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood, exploring every square inch of that desert town before the sun began to set and a gaggle of moms would begin calling us in, one-by-one, for dinner from the front porches.
And nearly every day after school, Alan would check in with his mother only to hear: “You can go out and play when your chores are done.” In all of my recollections, I can’t seem to ever remember him being outside with us on any day except Saturday (the younger boys of the family were excused from chores on Saturday afternoons).
Seeing my boys playing outside this evening it finally hit me: I think I now know what Alan must have felt all those years ago, watching the other boys tear off on their bikes while he went off to the chicken coop to gather up eggs.
The Uncertainty of Support
I’ve mentioned it before. Currently, we pay our bills by doing custom development work for local companies. It’s a great way to fund development of our Bluyah application. And it introduces us to facets of IT and all that that entails in a way that under other circumstances we would not have the opportunity to witness. In short — it reinforces on a near-daily basis the need there is for an application like Bluyah.
But having an on-going service contract, or an on-demand support agreement with a set of customers has a way of skewing your priorities. In short, your customers’ priorities become, as they should, your priorities. And their emergencies become your emergencies. And your development cycle — when push comes to shove — takes a back seat to your client’s development cycle.
Jon, one of our rock-star developers, often jokes about having to “do the chores” whenever I assign him a client development task. And he’s right. They are chores. The work needs to be done — and be done well — but they are chores nonetheless. In essence, we’re stuck inside doing all of the necessary work for our clients so we can keep the lights on and the Bluyah development cycle moving forward while, it seems, all of the other Seattle start-ups are outside playing in the sun. If I were eight again I’d probably scream “It’s just not fair!”
But I’m not.
I’m 41. I’m about a decade older than most of the other CEOs making pitches to the VCs. I’m reinventing our company (and, I would suspect, myself to a certain extent) at an age when most people are settling in. I’m doing my damned best to run a company that I think has a serious shot at making a meaningful impact. And at this stage of our young start-up life, as far as I can tell, that means that we have to do everything in our power to ensure we get to keep playing the game.
And that means: until an investor aligns with our vision for Bluyah, we’ll keep doing our chores.
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