Founder life, month 5
I haven’t had time to catch up with my brain most days - let alone write to an audience. But it’s always nice to take stock.
We’re now ~5 months into self-employment, something that’s taken me by surprise. While how I spend my time pendulums week on week, I have mostly swum into a new normal, looking to the founders ahead of me for a lot of guidance.
Similarly, a bunch of people who have been contemplating founder life have been asking me about what the last few months have been like - so I thought I’d write up some of the things I’ve experienced and pass it on.
On productivity
I don’t wake up with an alarm. This sounds great in theory, but in actuality I wake up most days with my brain whirring, sometimes in a panic, frequently at 5am. I invested in some loop earbuds to prioritize my sleep quality because it turns out that now when I am up…. I am up.
I need to work in spurts. There have been “peak periods” where I need to be staccato for days or weeks on end. Once they are over, my body forces me into recovery and I need to actively prioritize legato work for a bit. It’s been a learning curve working with my brain and body’s natural rhythms, but this is backed up by Cal Newport.
I used to think I “did it all” and now I realize I was completely wrong. Yes, I used to be a very busy PM. But I now realize how much support I had. SMEs, engineering management, multiple engineers, a manager… HR… Implementation…
There is nothing like working in person. Feat offsite #2.
On personal things
I have to be more honest, more quickly. I used to have the luxury of not making my expectations or disappointments known if lines got crossed; end of the day, it’s not my problem, I’m just an employee, right? But the level of starting a company skin in the game is different. Being agreeable is no longer something that I can afford to do.
I don’t have much else to say outside of work. People have had to yoink me out from under my rock to tell me what’s going on in the world. I’m also noticing that when people ask “so what’s going on”, my brain literally shuts down - I swear, I don’t know what to say because I don’t know where to start, and mostly I don’t even want to talk about work.
(My team reading this: huh, that’s weird, because you literally never stop bothering us on Slack).
I am delighted to follow. My husband has planned our entire belated honeymoon - a far cry from how much I planned our wedding - and I have been SO happy to just follow his lead. Last year I made elaborate multi-course meals when his family came to visit - and now the thought of anything that’s not one-pot is just unbearable.
My hero. Thank you. <3
What am I working on?
Mental health. I have a goal of trying to regulate my nervous system every day - even if only for a few minutes - because it’ll make me a better manager and leader. This role gets challenging for sure and is hard to understand unless you’re in it.
Delegating. I am fortunate to have a super proactive team who regularly steps forward. If you think I was about to say “to volunteer to expand their scope of work”, it has often looked more like “forcibly take things off Laura’s plate”.
My designer extended out of figma, into a weekly scrum cadence that has been game-changing.
My engineer joins UXR meetings, takes notes, and listens as actively as I do.
Zoning different days for different activities. Context switching 100% has a toll. Building and distributing are different headspaces. I’m constantly calibrating on a week by week basis.
So why should you give company building a try?
Obviously, there is significant pressure involved in creating something from nothing - against all odds. But it has been an incredible experience I would not give up for the world. Things like:
Talking directly to users. There is nothing like talking to people in pain and feeling uniquely positioned to solve it.
Headspace saved on ladder climbing. I didn’t realize until I was catching up with someone the other week how much of my headspace used to go towards navigating the experience of knowing my place on a larger ladder - not creating and showing results. The ladder is critical once a business is stable, but the growth for me has been enormous in early-stage.
Growing at hyper-speed. The instinct to survive will surprise you. I literally don’t feel like I have time to be embarrassed when I have to ask everyone I know for help. People have reminded me when they talk to me 3 weeks apart how much has evolved that I haven’t noticed - that it’s “almost a totally different company”. That’s kind of cool.
A+ bonding. To be clear - this is probably 80% stockholm syndrome speaking. But that doesn’t change how precious it is to get to work together with a really good hearted team on a powerful mission - especially when so much is stitched together based on trust. Everything we do at this point is going to be pretty bad. How can it not be? It’s a first version. We have few resources. There is no room for pontificating - and there’s amazing energy in knowing that everyone’s doing their best.
There’s been a lot of table-pounding laughter on this journey. You can’t not.
