The grind and the faith: ROSL82

ROSL82 Reflections on startup life — Week 82

The grind and the faith

Another week where “nothing happened”. We released some changes, we networked, we experimented with some new features, we kept our nose to the grind stone. The “TechCrunch” perspective of the world is exciting things happening every day, but in reality it’s frequently just plain old hard work to make those exciting things occur.

Weeks (months) like this test your startup faith. Pretty much every startup will have dark days, it’s those that can keep going because they believe in themselves and how they want to change the world that will eventually succeed.

On that note, there is a lot of talk lately about a new tech bubble forming. From my own reading and perspective there are some fundamentals that suggest we MIGHT be at the start of a bubble so there is a bubble in calling a bubble! Only time will really tell. Oh the irony — Wikipedia define a bubble as “cognitive biases that lead to groupthink and herd behavior.” which amuses me as this is exactly what I think is occuring in the calling it a bubble bubble.

This paragraph today caught my eye:

Investors tend to move money from one sector to another in anticipation that some industries may profit more in a certain stage of an economic cycle. Technology companies trailed the market this year after posting the third-worst performance in 2010. The stocks have suffered in a rotation into companies whose earnings are least-tied to economic growth amid concern the U.S. recovery is slowing. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-06-05/technology-stocks-cheapest-since-1998-as-ipos-spur-bubble-fear.html

That doesn’t sound like a bubble to me. I think what we are seeing is our “TechCrunch” perspective of the world — the over-hyped news cycle singling out some isolated examples of success.

I’m fed up with people in the industry engaging in what feels like a lot of Tall Poppy syndrome to me, talking down the success of entrepreneurs who held the faith through the dark days of the last decade and kept at it to build companies that are now fundamental to the way business is done. Business that are disrupting industries and changing the world.

(Potential) Bubble or no bubble, they deserve this moment in the sun. So keep it up Groupon, LinkedIn et. al. — I see inspiration and faith to stick through the dark days. When we “grow up” we’ll be happy to be called a bubble too.