Tag Archives: passion

Reflections on Startup life: Week 50

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Did you miss me? It's been bugging me all week that I haven't yet done my weekly post.  Let's just all pretend this is Monday and move on :-)

After 50 weeks of this, I think it's only the second time I haven't posted on Monday yet.  The excuse is a good one.  I went camping with the family up in Buchan.  Turns out that there are places in Victoria which DON'T GET THE INTERNET! Not even mobile reception (unless you're with Tel$tra).  So that was up until Tuesday, when we came home (Melbourne Cup day).

On Wednesday I had to get up early to return the hire car, then it was straight into the city for something new.  For the next few weeks I'm working with Sustainability Victoria on some Social Media Analysis work, so I didn't get a chance yesterday (was going to bash it out on the train, but battery was flat).  So here I am, Thursday morning, writing Monday morning's post.

So what's going on around here – last weeks post was pretty brief.  I think this is because we are getting busier.

We've just signed a couple of contracts – the consulting gig I'm working on at the moment with Sustainability Victoria and a development project with SportsGeek.  We always thought we'd have to do some consulting work to help "keep the boat afloat", but we also want to carefully select what we do – is it aligned to our values and interests, can we do a great job, do we like the people and is the work building the portfolio of experience for BinaryPlex?  Both of these projects are fantastic in that they meet these criteria for us.

It's something Alex and I have always spoken about.  The reality is we've known for a while that we would need to do some consulting work, but we don't want to "be" consultants.  We're an internet startup, it's core to our DNA (and actually something I think we are getting MUCH better at being).  The way to manage this is to make sure that the consulting work we do isn't just a cash cow, but rather it grows and develops us and is aligned to our core expertise.  We think that's good for us, and good for our clients.

To help understand this – we've resisted opportunities to project manage, to do IT architecture work, or develop anything not aligned to social for money.  While we still have some choice (ie. cash runway left) then we can afford to exercise this discretion.  What I love about what we are doing is that we are passionate about it – I can't think of anything more I'd rather be doing than what I'm working on in BinaryPlex; if we're going to consult, then we retain our startup values by selecting work that we can be just as passionate about.

So on to startup related things – our newest project is coming along really well.  One measure of success for any small team must be that you really want to use you're own tool.  With our new super secret project that will enter a limited closed beta this week, we've hit on something that we both desperately want to use.  Every day we find new ways that it would be of use to us.  Something <a href="http://startup.alexdong.com/cut-the-rope-fast-and-eat-our-own-dog-food/ Continue reading →

Reflections on Startup life: Week 49

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For this weeks blog post there are three things on the top of my mind.

  • Being passionate.

  • The value of time.

  • Reframing

Being Passionate

I received sad news last week. A very close friend (we were best man at each others weddings) who was in his very early forties passed away suddenly in his sleep, leaving behind his wife and three kids.

Aside from all the obvious feelings of shock and sadness, his wife and I had a conversation that really made me think. It turns out that Chris and I spent a lot of time talking ABOUT each other, reminiscing, thinking of the days gone by at University and so forth, and yet we never talked TO each other.

Life happened and kind of got in the way.

You know, that's OK – we were passionately getting on with the things in front of us. Giving our time to our careers, our family, our new friends that live nearby. I know Chris was a much loved person in his community.

But I still get left with the nagging feeling that somewhere in there should have been a little bit of room to pick up the phone and give him a call and say “hi”. I regret now that I didn't – there's room to be passionate on many levels. I'm trying this week to pick up the phone and say hi to a few old friends and let them know I'm still thinking of them, even if life does have a habit of getting in the way.

The Value of Time

You're in a startup, you're your own boss and no one is telling you what to do. So you can take time off right?

It comes down to Time Vs. Money. Naturally we haven't got much on the dollar front (we wouldn't be a startup if we did), so all we have is Time. Time is more precious than ever before in a startup as it's most likely the only commodity you do have.

When you've got money you can make time (fly instead of drive), but when all you've got is time, you can't make any more of it.

As we progress, time gets more and more valuable not less because there is more and more we need to do to succeed, yet we can't “make it happen with money” yet.

Reframing

Alex and I have had an ongoing discussion about features for a new product idea. It turns out that we were asking the wrong question.

By re-framing the question we were able to see that it was actually the concerns about the underlying issue which were the problem, not what we really discussing.

Root cause analysis is really key here – there are a lots of great techniques (5 why's is a good one) that help uncover this type of problem. We should of tried that sooner. Sometimes you need to step back from the discussion and ask yourself if you can ask this question a different way. In my experience it works well, helps break the deadlock and usually lets you move forward.