Let Go and Haul: Forget “sprints”, startups are endurance 👟
Week 22, 2019 – Bay Area, Los Angeles
Ah, I was so close to sending this out on Sunday night this week! But then my United flight back to NYC didn’t have internet (because United, ugh, I knew it was a bad idea), and then I ended up going to our storage locker in Brooklyn at 1:30 am when I got back in town (which lol, is definitely a story for next week) and yesterday we moved, so it’s Tuesday! Hi!
Journey: where we’re at
From my captain’s wheel of this ship, we’re smack in the middle of a Q2 re-alignment, which I suppose is worth calling out, since if you’re in the know on our plans, you can only imagine how much more intense this is course-correcting at the same time! By the same token, startups are always re-aligning to a degree. Every week is “pivot, iterate, kill”. At the beginning of April, Gen and I embarked on a number of priorities to realign what needed to be. April was a heavy month of correcting the course this ship is on. May started to pay us back for that work. The month closed out better than I could have imagined. All the wonderful things that happened in May were completely down to the team of humans executing and helping us realign, you are everything 😍Our goal is to complete this transition by the end of the quarter.
Pictured above: my job, I think?
Personally, it was a really exciting week. I had some really cool meetings in the Bay Area (hopefully more on that soon!), got to test TRASH out on Rick Prelinger’s film class at UCSC (which woah, is gorgeous!), and then worked with Kofi and Will in LA with some creators making content (that’s the best part of the job!) Despite the feelings of loneliness and FOMO that work travel often brings (like whyyyyyy are all my friends on a boat in the harbor with a view of the Statue of Liberty and a glass of rose in their hands while I’m battling a last-minute WWDC ticket snafu in my AirBnB), California was good to me this trip (and it was so beautifully green from all the rain!) I’m excited to be back in the heat of NYC summer and excited for the immense simplification of my life our new studio location is going to bring us while we attempt to pull off some impossible! 😁
(Serious shoutout to Fred and Ron for helping me with that ticket snafu 😅🙏)
Journal: what I learned
I learned I can perform a day like the one I’m about to describe without exploding. With the weather warming up, and an old back injury under control (enough) to do a workout like the way I used to, I’ve been getting back into running. As I’ve been adding minutes to my runs to get back to the level I used to be at, I’ve been thinking a lot about how a startup is truly an endurance sport. The days, the weeks, the years. It’s just about learning to run at a pace you can sustain without burning out, and continually “training” to be able to do it. Endurance.
So, here’s an example of a day that feels like an endurance run: holiday Monday last week I was working, had two meetings and had to pack and clean my apartment for an out of town colleague who was using it while I was going to be in Cali, so I didn’t get to sleep until midnight. Tuesday:
• Get up at 4am to make it to Newark by 6 for a 7am flight to SF, thank god I can sleep on planes
• Land at 10:30 PT to start my West Coast day. Pick up a rental car, drive to my friend’s place in the Haight where I was staying. Quickly freshen up. He offers me half a chocolate croissant, this turns out to be the only thing I eat until way later. Normally I have an emergency protein bar on me but I forgot it in the wrong bag…
• Meeting in the Castro (with someone I highly respect and want to impress)
• Back to the car to drive down to Stanford for my second meeting of the day (also with someone I highly respect and want to impress)
• Find a dinner snack, omg I am so hungry, drive back to SF during rush hour. Around 8:30pm I muster all my energy to go for a run through Buena Vista park (hills, 40 mins) since I’d been sitting on a plane most of the day and the 10 mins of stretches and yoga I did in the “morning” hardly counts. Keeping my herniated disc injury at bay is paramount to being able to do endurance days like this with a minimum amount of pain, so while this run felt like hell after that day, it was worth it.
• Shower and 1h of emails and prepping for the next day. Sleep at 10pm PT (1am ET) so I’d have time to get back in my morning routine before my 9am the next day.
Days like this take every millimeter of my self-discipline. Also, this was an awesome day, I learned a ton, everything worked out and it was extremely inspiring. I wouldn’t want to do that every day though!
Jams: what I’m into
Ciara, Ciara, Ciara. How does she do it? Love every bit of this album, there’s no topic she doesn’t touch: work, love, sex, leveling up, hustle, loving oneself, so here for this kinda mature look at the world. I’m kinda not in love with the videos so hrm, maybe just listen to the album 🙃
This video of these elementary school kids going ham to Old Town Road via Ela that has 17.6M views might be the best thing I’ve seen all week.
You’ve probably already seen this article that shows bringing old paintings and photos to life with ML, but just in case not, go watch that video.