Surviving a Startup
The key to surviving a startup is accepting failure. Being open to defeat. Throwing your arms open and realizing that you might close tomorrow and being okay with it.
Because if you come in every single day like it’s corporate America, you won’t survive. Like you’ll be open next year even if sales are down. Like this marketing strategy is just one of many. Like you have other chances beyond this week.
When I was hired, they asked me about my resiliency. I told them about graduate school. About statistics and thesis edits. About pushing through knowing it would end.
But the thing about a startup is that this doesn’t end. At least, if you’re lucky.
It’s a long series of no strategy and no roadmap and decisions without foresight. I guess that’s what makes us good: the guts to jump without thinking about gravity.
It’s frustrating. I don’t like defeat. I’m a B average kid who focused on what she did well and ignored the rest. But I don’t do defeat. Not at the things I’m good at. Not at marketing. I open my marketing roadmap and still add completion dates. I dutifully track my KPIs, even if my team only focuses on the negatives. I know things are right by gut alone and research until I can prove why this way is smarter. I ruthlessly cut corners until everything I produce is like the books in Battlestar Galactica.
I’d always wanted to work at a startup. It seemed so cool. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson with my stint in the agency world: you don’t want to be cool at a job, you want to be effective. And the more I push forward, the more I morph into an almost-thirty version of high school me. You know it’s bad when I’m playing Pinkerton with my windows rolled down and my hair up. It’s 2004 again, and I’m just wondering if it’ll all be okay in the end.
Working at a startup is like nothing I expected and everything I should have known.
It feels like splitting yourself open and letting it all rush in. Like drowning. But instead of water it’s product launches and PR and private events. Endless ideas and excitement and no strategy.
We all say that if this one fails, we won’t join another startup. That this is it. But I’m not so sure. I love the freedom and the urgency. The sense that it’s never finished. I feel more myself here, creative and confused. It’s like neon colors: slightly too much but so much fun.
The key to surviving in a startup is accepting who you are. Who the company is. Throwing your arms open and realizing that everything has an end date.