Last year I decided I was going to build my own company. I’m very fortunate to have friends who are founders and CEO’s of successful companies. However, they’ve all have been at it for so long, they have forgotten what their journey was like. So this talk will document how my own experience went because it’s very fresh. I have my own unique point of view on what it means to build a company. As a person, I am motivated by curiosity and learning. So, for me, building a company was really about seeing how far I could go.
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Reality Check on Building a Business
This past year, I realized you have to go through a lot of lows before you get the wonderful TechCrunch article written about you. According to Peter Thiel, author of Zero to One, starting a company means you begin at zero. However, in my opinion, you actually don’t ever start at zero. You actually start at negative one hundred.
If you’re starting a completely new product in an existing company, you have this vision of what the end state looks like. It’s that picture of you and your best self. Yet, people that start new things with successful outcomes often suffer from chronic depression and anxiety. I think that is important to understand – birthing a new idea and bringing it into the world is very difficult to process correctly.
What is Your Why?
The first step in deciding to create something new is to ask yourself, why do you do it? What’s the payoff? Essentially, this is the question you will ask yourself every day when you wake up. Especially when there are seven emails in your inbox that are essentially putting you down.
When I started last year I wrote down why am I doing this. Because in your worst moments you need to look back and remind yourself that your higher self had a good reason. Not doing so is why most people quit in the minus one hundred to zero stage. It never ends – life gets incrementally harder because your business can die any moment. If it can happen to big companies like Microsoft it can happen to you.
What is Your Building Focus?
So next question. What do I focus on? I could build the next Redfin. I could build the next healthcare insurance company. There’s opportunity everywhere. How do you decide? Well, it’s a little bit like playing a sport. First, you pick which sport you’re going to play. Then you decide what position you’re going to play. Don’t worry too much about having a completely polished idea because I guarantee you it will change. Instead, think about the space- which space do you want to play in, and why.
Long story short, pick a space that plays to your strengths and evokes your passion in some way. If you are currently in a domain that you’re not passionate about please start making moves to get to a domain that you are passionate about. It will change your outlook and perspective.