This is a story about doing more faster...
Startup accelerators are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But what's to be done with the wayward founders, the ones who burn out? How does somebody decompress, decelerate from the high demands of an intensive program like an accelerator?
Here's something I wrote on day 28 of the 13-week Springboard program, which is part of the global TechStars network:
My company was shortlisted for TechStars, Boulder, CO, USA. I got the news at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. I needed to be in Boulder for about 10am the next morning. Solution? Get on a plane to Denver that night and drive straight to Boulder in the morning. No problem.
When I arrived at London Heathrow airport and went to check in for my flight, it turned out that the visa waiver program had changed since the last time I was in the USA. I needed an ESTA. This was a problem... the embassy was now closed. However, I managed to apply for my ESTA and get the all-important number in about 15 minutes, standing at the checkin desk, via a US government website.
On the plane, I read a book from cover to cover: Do More Faster by Dave Cohen and Brad Feld, founders of TechStars. It seemed apt, and I had finished the book by the time we landed in Colorado. I then met Dave Cohen later that day, along with Nicole Glaros who was heavily pregnant at the time, but still running the Boulder program.
I guess I shouldn't really associate myself with the TechStars network, given my precarious professional position, and the nature of this blog, but it's impossible to tell my story without somehow including the post-accelerator implosion that I went through. Certainly it's important to state that I always had the support of the network and fellow founders at all times though. Things would probably have ended up a lot worse without that safety net.
Anyway, I didn't really love my startup. I didn't have a lot of passion for the industry sector it was in and the software challenge had already been overcome. We started the program with a cashflow positive business, working software and an established customer and reseller base. I definitely took the wrong startup through the Springboard program. We should have pivoted more aggressively, but you live you learn.
I should have ceded control to my co-founder, David, a lot earlier. The acting coach that Jon got - Annette - to help us with our pitches, suggested that we give David a shot as the CEO. It was good advice. However, ego got in the way. I liked having those three little letters as my job title, even if I wasn't any good at the job and hated all the roles and responsibilities of it.
The problem is, I'm an engineer, and engineers just want to solve problems. In sales meetings, I would be far more concerned about the customer getting the solution that met their needs, than trying to extract a commercially sensible amount of cash from them. It was more important to me that my software was being used, rather than it bringing in sustainable revenues.
Looking back now, it makes much more sense that David and I should have switched roles. He's really good at the whole business administration and driving a hard sales bargain thing. He's really good at making sure that the whole business runs smoothly and is well administered. I only care about the software.
Jon did an interesting thing to try and save us from ourselves (or rather, from me). He got in a bunch of psychologists to come and tell us that we should be consultants, not running a startup. He had tired of nursing us through the growing pains of founder conflict, and joking about our "mutually assured destruction (MAD)" pact, which he wrote on the whiteboard above our heads.
Between Jon, Jess and the other founders we somehow managed to muddle through to the end of the program. There was only one time that I was so offensive that I nearly got my head kicked in. I would have deserved it. I was wrong, David was right, and my beef was with the browser, not him. I was upset that some technical detail wasn't quite measuring up to my preconceived notions, and refusing to try David's suggestion, which wasn't to specification. Of course, it did work, but being a stubborn engineer, I just didn't want it to work like that.
The weird thing is that David and me didn't have a very startup-y lifestyle. After I had finished with TechStars in Boulder, I jumped in my hire car, drove to Vail and went snowboarding. David used to be a ski instructor and sometimes do programming work in Arinsal, Andorra, inbetween forays onto the piste. We both had a pretty nice life. We didn't really need startup stress, hassle and belt tightening.
Apart from living away from our girlfriends in Cambridge for 3 months, there wasn't a lot of hardship that we really suffered, apart from the sheer workload of Mentor Madness and having to try and run a business at the same time as participate in a startup accelerator. I'm glad we did it though. Those experiences and contacts are very precious to me, even if I've not exactly made the most of them, yet.
Our intake must have been a record one for babies. There were two founders - including my co-founder, David - who had girlfriends who were pregnant. The first Springboard babies were born only months after the program ended. How those guys did it, I have no idea. Hero dads.
Obviously, David wanted to maintain a stable family home near Bristol for his first-born child. The end of the program marked the culmination of the intractable problem of where to locate the business. My ex-wife certainly wasn't giving any ground or prepared to compromise even an inch. I was rather caught inbetween a rock and a hard place. Naturally, I just had a meltdown rather than dealing with things in any sensible way.
The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the girl who never supported me in any of my endeavours and was simply an ungrateful drain on my time, money and resources. She expected zero impact in our lifestyle, from me choosing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Funding lavish holidays for her on a startup salary is quite hard to budget for.
But an unstoppable change had been started within me. I found Cambridge life to be exciting, exhilarating, even if it was only by some tenuous association with the University of Cambridge. I loved being around smart people. Startup founders are great to hang out with because they say "yes, and" rather than "no, but".
I really needed to go through a breakup, but I don't really handle failure very well. I knew my startup was going to fail with me at the helm. I had failed as CEO. I had failed to make my relationship work. I wanted to change my entire life, but I felt trapped.
My word is my bond, and I take commitment very seriously. I'm also a completer-finisher. I would rather finish something to a terrible shoddy standard, than leave a job uncompleted. I have lots of finished projects, but most of them are not to a very high standard. I'd prefer something was done, rather than perfect.
So it was, that I came to be trying to meet the screamed selfish demands of a spoiled partner, whilst also unable to bite the bullet and step down from my position as CEO, and also accept that I needed to chuck away and change most pieces of my life. They were challenging times, in the couple of months following Springboard.
During one trip back to Cambridge, in an attempt to secure a seed round of funding, I pretty much told all our potential investors that there was no interesting intellectual property in our business and it was a completely copyable business model. Not a smart move. I could almost see my co-founder facepalm when I told the panel this. Engineer's problem. I cannot speak a lie on technical matters.
Anyway, perhaps I wanted the thing to die, because my life was pretty miserable post-Springboard. Back in my spare-bedroom office, over a hundred miles away from my co-founder, and over a hundred miles away from London, and the wrong side of town to get to Cambridge. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, which I was.
Just about the only thing I've done too slowly in my life is to ditch a dead relationship. I tend to pick the wrong partners and allow klingons and coat-tail riders to try and hang on for a free ride. I tolerate fools too gladly. David is certainly no fool, and I feel very privileged to have gotten to work with him. However, he quite rightly stood his ground and didn't compromise on matters that were my responsibility to resolve.
The pressure to provide a luxury lifestyle for an ungrateful and unsupportive partner, and give up on my hopes & dreams was too much to ask of me. I was sinking fast into a depression, as my all-too-brief foray into the liberating world of running a business and being an entrepreneur, plus my time in the company of startup founders, mentors and academics, was looking like it was over forever.
I tried to prop things up, getting a job back in corporate bankerland. Shovelling other people's s**t for a living. It broke my heart. You can have the most lavish lifestyle in the world, but if what you do for 50+ hours a week is basically total bulls**t that you hate, then it won't be any compensation at all.
My ex-wife and my Dad really worked very hard to pull the rug from under my feet, and I'm really upset about it. However, I know it's my fault for not pushing those toxic people out of my life and following my dreams. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again, but they still can't see that their small-mindedness and lack of vision has caused so many golden opportunities to be wasted. I actually have hard numbers showing that investment ideas of mine that they vetoed have now turned out to be ridiculously profitable. Never mind.
I actually feel as though I've never been allowed to dream. I've always been expected to just shovel shit for everybody else to prop up their dreams. I didn't go to University when all my friends were going, because my Dad made such a big deal about what a waste of money it was. I didn't follow my startup dreams, because I was pretty much forced to provide a luxury lifestyle, and chain myself to a remote seaside town for an ungrateful partner who didn't appreciate a single cent of it.
Anyway, moan moan moan. That kind of negative attitude is not going to get me anywhere. I've watched it all burn down, while my Dad and ex have stuffed their pockets and then distanced themselves from me. It should have been vice-versa. I should have shut those toxic people out of my life a lot sooner.
Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. That's not going to be my epitaph. There's no sense in living in the past, and I apologise that this blog has been firmly rooted back in time, as I struggle to move forwards with my life.
You probably can't understand why I've left highly paid jobs and contracts, and put myself through all the stress of founding a business. I know I complain about the overhead of business administration sometimes, but I really have few complaints about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I know that Jon's psychologists told me that I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur, but it's something that keeps coming back to me... that desire to found and shape businesses, to lead, to create.
You don't see the sacrifice that has enabled me to enter the corporate world on a decent wage. You don't know how much of an isolated lonely existance that a geek had at school, programming their calculator and designing sprites in the back of their exercise books, when they should be having schoolday antics with the group of friends that they didn't have.
The loners, the eccentric introverts, the odd-ones-out are thrust together out of a necessity for safety in numbers, and sure those people become friends, but you're all still prisoners in your own mind to some extent. You might be able to see your friends get bullied too, but when it's your turn, you have to endure it all on your own.
Suddenly, being a techie geek startup guy becomes cool, and you are hot property. You can earn big cash selling your soul to the corporate sector, or you can sell lies to investors and have a super cool office of your own. Fake it until you make it, but you never faked it. You just woke up one day, and you're one of the highest paid people, because of stuff you did because you had a lonely childhood, with your head buried in books, or hunched over a keyboard.
Look, there are those sprites I designed in the back of my school exercise book, now on the wall of a global bank's office. You can't see how hard I've worked. You have no idea how much suffering there has been behind the bored looking exterior of the guy asking awkward questions on a conference call, slouched in his chair at his desk.
I can't hark back to 3 or 4 years of my life when I had very little to do except read books and write essays about things I found interesting. I never got to spend my investor's money on cool mosaic decorations on the wall, and bean bags and a table tennis table for my team. My startup life spans pretty much 3 months in a startup accelerator. That was the only time in my life when I really believed in what I was doing. When I was surrounded by smart people who I liked and respected. I was forging my own path through life.
So, what's to be done? Well, I'm running low on cash again, so I guess I will have to do another stint at the coal face. I will have to go on a raiding mission into corporate crazy-land and shovel s**t for some more dollars. I don't really have enough capital to risk chasing my dreams, as usual. As usual, I have been nickel and dimed by the klingons, coat-tail riders and the toxic people in my life, and I'm the one who feels bullied and alone.
I'm kinda used to it. I guess you could call this regression therapy. I've gone back to my childhood, where I had my head in the clouds and I was just writing programs and designing sprites, to distract myself from the crushing loneliness and brutality of the daily bullying.
It looks like there are a lot of open doors to me, but you've got to believe me when I tell you that it's virtually torture to go back into the corporate world, having had a taste of freedom.
I'll do what has to be done, and I'm sure you hate me for acting all spoiled and privileged, but you have to understand just how heartbreaking it is to sell your soul so cheaply.