Calling It

 It's been a very good week for us.  We've presented to five schools about what Thumbprint can do and proposed pilot programs so that the school can see for themselves.  All five have said yes.  That's pretty good, considering I expect to be shown the door 50-75% of the time.  I don't think our success is due to our being sales geniuses - we aren't.  Nor do I think it's because of our marketing, or our track record, or our user interface.  I think it's because of this:  We built something that teachers want.  When they see that, they want in.

We spent a very, very long time trying to understand what it is to be a teacher, and then to build technology that made that experience easier and more powerful.  We built something that we thought addressed those needs very well.  But until you start talking to real teachers, and lots of them, you're still guessing.  Did you get it right?  Who knows?

Now we are beginning to know.  It is very gratifying to talk about where you think teachers and technology are at, and to have the teachers agree with you.  It sounds easy, but it is incredibly rare to really lock in on what your customers need.  Apple does it like clockwork, but the rest of us struggle.  To have done this even once in my career is something I'm very proud of, although the lion's share of the credit goes to the Development team, who relentlessly hammered both me and each other to make it better, simpler, more powerful.  And thanks to those teachers who have agreed to take the next step with us.  We think it's going to be great.

Imagination

I'm standing in a room.  I see a set of upholstered chairs arranged around a nice, wide coffee table.  Against one wall is a large screen and an Apple TV box.  Smart young folks fill the seats, iPads in hand, talking through a problem.  One of them is projecting their work on to the big screen.  I'm smiling.  This is a good day.

None of it is there, of course.  The chairs or the people or the screen.  I'm standing in an empty room with walls and windows.  But I can see what it can be, superimposed like an hallucination. There are just two problems:

1. I am absolutely terrible at the most of the steps that stand between the dream and reality
2. I need to get this dream into someone else's head, or it'll just stay a dream

And that's the startup, in a nutshell.  You see the idea, but you can't build it by yourself, and you can't hand it to someone like passing a ball.  This can be frustrating.  "It's right there!" you think.  "Can't you see it?"  But they can't.  Because they're normal, well-adjusted people that don't live in your brain.  So you have to talk, and write, and gesticulate, and scramble to find the words.  After awhile people start to question your sanity a little.

Eventually, if you don't give up, the thing takes shape.  The chairs come in, and then the people. And if it works the way you thought it would, pretty soon everyone thinks it's perfectly normal.  Nobody remembers the dream anymore - not even you.  It's just the way the world is now.

That Kevin Costner Movie

"If you build it, they will come."  You know, that line from Field of Dreams?  Someone punch me in the head, please.  I've heard and said that phrase so often over the years.  And we use it, and reuse it, and overuse it, because it perfectly captures the mindset of almost any startup venture, particularly one that depends on creating a community of users.

Maybe I should coin the negative: "If you don't build it, they won't come."  True, but not as pithy.  As we begin to add capacity here, adding space and manpower, there's always the risk of adding too much, growing too fast, and running into trouble.  That would be bad.  But what would be worse would be having a sudden influx of users and schools and not being able to keep up with them.  Having a party no one shows up to is bad.  Having one where they show up, find there's nothing to eat or drink, and leave in a huff - that's worse.

And so we grow, as carefully as we can, and hope we get the balance right.

Pacing

Time for Start-up Inside Baseball.  When it's crunch time, you laugh at 60 hour weeks.  You chew through 80 hour weeks.  You grunt through 100 hour weeks.  You do what it takes, knowing that, succeed or fail, that pace can't last forever.  And sure enough, it doesn't.  Soon you're back to that most dreaded of schedules - the 40 hour week.

After months of measuring productivity by the minute, forgoing sleep, neglecting yourself, the body acclimates to a sort of hyper-efficiency where every waking moment is in pursuit of a goal. This isn't healthy, but you become used to it, like a chronic injury.  And when it's removed, when you can actually stop working at 6pm and do whatever you want, the brain starts screaming.  Something is wrong!  Get up off the mat!  You're burning daylight!  You start sorting through your email, flipping through collected business cards, calling up your staff, looking for something you can turn into a crisis, just to make the screaming stop.

All of this is perfectly insane, of course.  But I think it's fairly common.  I think it's one reason why so many of us are workaholics.  Crunch time and crises condition us to look at each moment not spent dealing with emergencies as wasted time.  We start to associate our self-worth with the amount of time we spend saving the company.  And so we fill our lives with emergencies, just to feel normal.

Or do we?  Am I alone in this?  Let me know in the comments.