Four years ago my colleague and good friend Kanav and I, decided to quit our jobs and start a company. We were not driven by a specific mission. We were not scratching an itch or solve a problem that we felt strongly about. We were not looking to put a dent in the universe or change the world. We literally just wanted to start a company.
It sounds silly and it took us a while to actually make peace with this fact. We read up scores of studies on intrinsic motivations and listened to a bunch of TED talks to try to find (or come up with) reasons of wanting to start a company that we could get behind. We didn’t find any. Then we flipped the question. We knew we wanted it, we started thinking what it would get us. That framing changed everything. We made a list of things one gets by building a startup and then chose the ones we felt so strongly about. In this post I will list out those things.
This was a concept we got introduced to, by a family friend and advisor. Ego drivers as the name suggests are things that massage your ego. This isn’t something to frown about or look down on. If you want to be a top dog in your peer group, acknowledge that you want to be a top dog in your peer group. We wanted this. We knew startups are hard and not everyone could make it. If we could make it, it would be a proverbial chip on the shoulder. We just couldn’t resist. It was an intellectual equivalent of running a marathon and we wanted to run so bad.
Human beings are supposed to be natural explorers. From the moment a baby is born, it experiments, observes and makes inferences. Running your own startup means going to work with a blank canvas everyday. Looking at everything and questioning ‘why not’ and ‘what if’, is an addiction. The sheer amount of dopamine release one gets to experience every day with exploring new trends and ideas is something money just cannot buy.
Morgan Housel articulates “freedom”, perfectly in his book the Psychology of Money. He says it is the “ability to do what I want, when I want, whoever I want with, for however long I want”. We hadn’t articulated it this clearly back then but freedom of choosing to solve the problems we wanted on our own terms meant a lot to us. At the very least, doing a startup allowed us to integrate our life with work in a way most people cannot. I often think of this as a detoxification of life. It is hard to find yourself in a position where you have complete control over removing things that drain your life and bringing in elements you admire.
This is an easy one. Your startup, your rules. If you want to build what’s already out there cheaper, go ahead. If you want to sell something already out there more efficiently, go ahead. We wanted to build something world class that did not exist, so this is the journey we are on. I am not trying to undermine one reason or the other. It is simply your choice. Ours was building a global product that people all over the world would use with satisfaction. Most of my first year was spent building and interacting with customers. Getting emails from strangers appreciating what you’ve built and how it’s making their lives a bit easier and happier is something most people never experience in their lives.
This one is a bit nuanced so bear with me. I should clarify that I wrote ‘people you like’ and not ‘people like you’. Working and spending almost half your waking hours with people you like and admire is a massive life hack. When you start a company, you get to define its culture. Culture is a fancy term for a simple list of do’s and don’ts. What you as founders do or encourage, becomes acceptable, what you don’t do or discourage, dies down. The book Radical Candor talks about providing guidance to your team by balancing two parameters – caring personally and challenging directly. When you genuinely like and admire someone, you end up caring for them personally. This automatically makes you vested in their success and you feel compelled to challenge them directly. When people in a team are not second guessing everything that is said and bring their whole selves to work, something great happens. It goes without saying that you also need diversity of opinions and experiences. That ensures you will have opportunities to learn every day.
Jordan Peterson (a person whose political views I don’t share or admire), wrote an interesting chapter on risk in his book 12 rules for life. He says humans are not always trying to minimise risk but to optimise it. Risk unlocks a different kind of thinking. It puts specific constraints and creates a game with different rules. If you’ve ever played a new board game, you know what I am talking about. The first few times you play it are the most exhilarating. The book Decisive has a very interesting technique on understanding risks and making decisions. It is called bookending. Assessing the worst case and best case scenarios and then taking calculated risks to ensure the worst case does not kill you and leaves enough firepower to bounce back, is one of the most exciting parts of running a startup. A safe cushy job that pays for a comfortable life is like a highway drive. You can drive fast and with relative safety. There might even be some cool views to admire from time to time. A startup life is akin to off-roading in a rainforest. It is not fast and not safe but it is exciting many times over.
The startup I am talking about is Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.