I announced the break-up of our relationship to my cofounders.
The painfully ugly truth avalanched: one cofounder, Jo, was actually impeccable at receiving the news. Jo understood that the scars in our dynamic relationship had grown us stiff and inflexible to change, which he knew was fatal for the health of a startup. On the other hand, the other cofounder, Bob, admitted in private to me his deception from the beginning in hiding elements of our backend from the company as insurance against a break-up like this one. He began to accuse me of heinous behaviors over the past year while intertwining strangely condescending compliments in his monologue like “if you got an MBA from Harvard or Stanford, you’d be dangerous” or “you have the ability to be a great business man, but you’re young, inexperienced, and have made stupid decisions in the past” and my personal favorite, “you probably calculated this break-up from the beginning, with asking me to document the backend and then entering the innovation hub and getting married.” Bravo Bob, you finally showcased your imagination: I am a soulless mastermind who has observed and targeted all my partners from the beginning to push them to the sideline right before taking the big win. It’s fascinating how in all his discourse, every unpleasant experience that the company felt was in his mind directly rooted to my fault, as if there were no other factors that could have contributed to the whiningly dragging and loudly dysfunctional operation of our venture. I do not mind carrying the burden of failure. But if I should do so, allow me the decency to carry the joy of success. What about how we were able to grow a kickass team of self-made developers and marketers that came to respect one another as people who could get improbable shit done? How about how we were able to build an application from scratch without any outside investment and get 200 users to check in once a week? Or how we favorably renegotiated terms with an early investor who adamantly opposed my idea on how to grow our business? Not one positive outcome was mentioned as he labored in detail over my shortcomings as a corrupted leader. No time to rejoice, only time to criticize. As I attempted to express my condolences for his suffering, he was quick to belittle my thoughts and efforts as CEO of our company. He had suffered a complete dismemberment from reality and was grasping for every wrinkle in our story to tear his own dismally fractured tale from. This was a learning experience for all of us. Accusing me of contributing nothing tangible to the company, he forgets that I am the reason we made it as far as we did.
The most disturbing part of it all is that I am not surprised by Bob. Amidst all his complaints about how I managed the company with, “after spending 8 hours on a piece of functionality you decide we should go in another direction, it’s excruciatingly frustrating” and “I honestly can’t believe that you don’t regret the decisions you made after finding out they were wrong” and “we should have been consulted on big decisions like branding and marketing” show me that 1) we have not been on the same page 2) he has no idea what a startup is. It became clear to me that Bob did not know what he’d signed up for. His reproaches and malicious angst are stemming from a misplaced seed of entitlement to success just because of the hours he put into coding a backend… Bob is not an entrepreneur.
To end this trial, I was lucky enough to get a final and encompassing message texted to me from Bob the night before our close-out meeting:
“Your words say one thing while your actions speak to your true motives. Didn’t think it was possible to feel more betrayed by someone I once called a friend than I did last week, but what do you know, [my full name] does it again. I recognize there is an evil inside you that allows you to manipulate/use people like you do; I just hope you recognize it in yourself before you wake up one day and realize everyone you care about in this world can’t stand the person you’ve become.”
For those who are interested in a “criminal” mind’s learnings, I have outlined what I’ve been able to self-reflectively distill so far.
Find untapped talent + grab it —
Clear all noise and listen closely, it has no particular traits and could be sleeping in a computer science class or delivering pizza on Friday nights after 7pm. It will scream in your face and will sound like hope, curiosity, and an insatiable desire to live in the tomorrow. When you do find it, you have to nurture that talent and give it what it needs to flourish into an unstoppable force. This requires time and conviction, very little funds required.
What’s wrong with persuading tapped talent if you can afford it? Because although it might be easy to hit the ground running with a fresh tool out of the box, it is even easier to overlook the person when you are focused on hiring skills for cash. A startup will die with tapped talent that feels entitled and overly confident in their personal ability. The nature of new, high-growth ventures is that the playing field is leveled. There is no hierarchy, there is no authority, there are no rules nor decorated veterans to scoff at you when you stumble at square one. Leave your pride at home with your family for holiday dinners. A startup needs humble, untapped talent, who can see what you see and be willing to grow with you. My Bob never actually saw the vision I saw, and I overlooked this discrepancy because he had tapped (7 academic degrees to inflate an ego is a red flag) talent. Alternative priorities, coupled with a genuine apathy towards the vision, a greedy talent has sloppily put together a backend over the past year that could not be more complicated and nonintuitive than it is. A misappropriated overkill in engineering resources has led to the creation of a product in a market that is still not sure of itself. I could go on, but let me stop here.
Negotiate an operating agreement + sign it —
I don’t care if you are going into business with your best friend, your wife, your brother, or even your mother. You must define each person’s role from the beginning, otherwise you will have imbalances in power where a Bob will ordain later on on his own a “partner” role as the conservative disruptor of innovation, claiming in the end that it was a necessity to keep the CEO in check with unadulterated condescension and misplaced authority (I can see why an accredited academic can experience entitlement issues, but business is beyond books). Please do yourself a favor and do not begin working on a project with anyone until you have all signed this kind of document. You really shouldn’t go into business with people whom you cannot talk about this stuff openly and without emotion. The future will prove to be wildly more difficult if you are not real with each other from the first day.
Do not take outside investment + make it rain —
You want money. You think that cash will make things happen for you, as if having funds would solve all your problems and grow your company to the moon. Take a cold shower.
You don’t need money. Money is your enemy: it explodes your sense of self worth (self worth != net worth), it strains even the closest of relationships, it makes others who don’t have it envy you. It will drive people crazy, and makes you anxious every moment you have some. Why do you think you need money? Because society has engineered us to feel that way. Society has been built to worry you all night about your net worth so that you will get in line for a paycheck. The more you come to understand money as a tool and not a friend, the sooner you will be ready to wield it without emotion.
Instead of worrying about the money, focus on the reason you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the beginning, to be a part of tomorrow with the untapped talent surrounding you (they become good friends if you do this right). You have to pour your soul into what you are doing. You need to be what you want to see even when no one else sees it. It’s probably the most difficult thing to do as a human being. Using your faith to create immense value is ultimately what will bring you success and the hot showers, beach homes, long vacations, early retirement. Now you can get excited again. When you have created something that is beautiful and purposeful, even if the world did not need it before, the world will learn to want what you have brought into existence. People will come to crave the creation that came from your growing faith, and when that happens, you will have made it rain.
I think that pretty much sums up what I’ve learned this past year. I will take these lessons on to the next life adventure. Stay tuned.
Mindset Uplift 