Juggling
I remember trying to figure out how to juggle. I don’t use the term learn because that sounds too much like someone was teaching me or I referred to a book or other manual that gives pointers on how to throw the balls in the air and catch them. Starting ChipIn was at first more figuring it out than learning how to start a company. There are no books, manuals, or templates for starting a company and I think too many entrepreneurs constantly look for inspiration from other people. Our approach has been to gather up our raw ideas, business strategies, and thoughts first, and then package them in a way other people can understand. Our founding team has had a tremendous amount of experience with startup companies, but each time you start a new company you have to “figure it out” all over again. We were able to pull from past experiences, past mistakes, and our “should have, could have” list of changes and improvements we would make if given a second chance.
ChipIn in many ways is our do-over, though this time we’re older, wiser, and a bit more humble (well maybe not that humble if we consider ourselves wiser). The first thing you figure out after running a startup gig a couple of times is that there are a couple of key lessons (part 1):
1) Surround yourself with smarter and better people. Just because you are the CEO or whatever other big dog title you give yourself, doesn’t mean you’re more important than those you work with .
2) Bring a personal touch to everything you do, let who you are show by how your company interacts with other people. Don’t put on a act, just be yourself, because most likely whoever you are talking/working with - from your vendors to your biggest strategic partner - will appreciate knowing that they can trust you. Also, when you are dead tired and talking, it is just too hard not to be you.
3) Be able to say NO! As a startup we are faced with difficult decisions many times a day when deciding on almost everything. The hardest thing to learn is how to say NO based on what you believe to be the best for the company long term. A good example is turning away money you know is not a good match for your long term strategy… take the short term setback and believe in your future success.
Ok.. I have to get back to Chippy stuff, so more rants on lessons learned from starting up and sitting down (hey, maybe a good title for the next post or a book?) in a couple of days.
On a ChipIn note, things are moving forward with the prototype with only a few delays. I must admit this was expected as it is almost impossible for an alpha product come out the door on time. Kev and Jerome are cranking away on the code and it was not realistic to predict a delivery date on a new platform based on our original scheme in Jan. I applaud the engineering team for continuing to produce excellent coding with our long term scalability in mind. This is a great example of Kev saying “NO” to releasing something that fit or schedule in the short term, but would have had a negative impact on our long term success.
A nice little suprise is going to hit the newstands next week… more on that soon. And oh yeh, welcome Jerome to our team! He should be landing soon to code with us full time.