It’s been quite some time since I published an update here. I don’t feel well about it, but everyone at our Sync team is all hands on deck to ship product and handle the feedback we’re getting from our early Beta users.
Times like this are equally exciting and hard. It’s been 10 years since I was in the same situation, creating something out of nothing, trying to show that what we’re building has a place in the market. And truth be told, I had forgotten how hard it is. Over the years I had developed some “luxuries”, having a growing team of people to delegate tasks, while I kept for me the task of hiring more great people and aligning the team on strategy and vision.
But now I’m back to base one; doing a thousand different tasks, working on the nitty-gritty details of product, answering customers’ feedback, taking calls with our Beta users, discovering new tools for social media publishing, reading medical books and research papers, and as always hiring new people. Everything is messy. There’s almost zero order in the way the job gets done and chaos is abundant. Conviction lives side by side with feelings of doubt.
This is something that takes over your life, but it's surprising how much you become consumed by your new startup, in that you think about it day and night, but never once does it feel like "work". But it’s also an emotional roller-coaster. The highs are obviously fun but the lows are really tough. But I love it! Doing the actual, low-level work is exhilarating. A leader is developed from the ground up, doing work on one-inch altitude and mostly, doing things that don’t scale.
Heroes
These are the moments when I come to appreciate even more all the entrepreneurs in the world who start new ventures from scratch. Being someone who has built a reasonable level of confidence over the years, with lots of experience and a few successes, I can only stand in awe in front of the much younger and inexperienced entrepreneurs who go through the same struggles only driven by their passion for building something of value.
I want to celebrate them as my heroes and help as much as my time permits. I want to do my best in taking calls with founders who ask for my point of view in building their businesses. I want to invest money if I believe in the direction they’ve taken. And I want to use this blog to share lessons as much as my time permits.
Connecting with builders wherever they are in the world is my goal. The ones who want to build their enterprise, I’d like to help however possible. The rest, I want to work with.