This is fine 🧯

When you join or start a start-up, things will not be fine, but that's OK.

When you join or start a start-up, you will feel everything seems to be breaking most of the time. A thousand things to get done. Endless work. Endless hustle. You will learn to embrace this feeling. Lucky for you, not all broken things are equal. Not all requires your attention now. 10 out of 1000 things are the most impactful to fix now. Everything else is secondary. Everything else is not worth the attention or the anxiety. Attention is precious and your credit of anxiety should be deferred and spent wisely.

• You will feel lonely.

• You will be ignored initially.

• You will be rejected by investors.

• You will be rejected by prospects.

• You will get phones hanged up on you over cold calls.

• You will have 1 lonely like on your thoughtful Linkedin posts.

• You will write, and re-write your product.

• You will build crap no one wants.

• You will sell your product for so cheap, because YOLO.

• You will have frustrated and angry customers.

• You will get rude customers.

• You will lose deals for reasons out of your hands.

• You will deploy code that breaks your product.

• You will build a crappy interview process.

• You will hire the wrong people.

• You will hire the wrong people, again.

• You will have to wake up at 2 am to take a sales call.

• You will have to onboard a customer at 11.34 PM.

• You will have your best engineer resign to join a big tech co.

• You will get rejected (possibly laughed at) when trying to hire a FANG engineer.

• You will underestimate the time it takes to close deals.

• You will overestimate your product's market fit.

• You will pivot multiple times.

• You will second-guess your decisions.

• You will have churning customers.

• You will have to be a great vision communicator.

• You will need to run your first all-hands.

• You will need to inspire, motivate and lead.

• You will have to let go of genuinely nice but unfit people.

• You will burn out. Then burn out some more.

• You will have to manage conflicting advice from who-have-done-it-before.

• You will have to negotiate with difficult suppliers or partners.

• You will underestimate the complexity of seemingly simple stuff to build or do.

• You will hire someone who looks perfect on paper but is a culture nightmare.

• You will have to fire someone within their first month.

• You will underestimate the time it takes for hires becoming productive.

• You will have sleepless nights of fear and loneliness.

• You will have to be really good at sales.

• You will keep scratching your head to what marketing really is.

• You will keep saying demand gen 100 times every day.

• You will worry about competitors.

• You will scratch your head of users behaviour using your product.

• You will suck at running product research sessions.

• You will say no to a lot of things that you want to say yes to.

• You will get hoards of fake "consultants".

• You will fight for 2 pixel margins.

• You will feel like things are going 1000x slower than it should.

• You will not earn as much as you can.

• You will be good at cutting through bullshit.

• You will get angry, and regret it.

• You will be expected to set the bar.

• You will be expected to be the role model.

• You will have really tough days, and other fantastic days.

But you will continue. You will persevere. You will keep going.

Because what else is worth doing? What else will raise the bar for what you can do with the little time you have on this earth? What else will make you see the fullest of your potential?

This is the most selfless bet you can take. This is the shortest way to truly understand and know yourself. This is a journey of self discovery, self honesty, and self understanding. This is a journey of zero tolerance to bullshit and mediocrity. This is a chance to see yourself as is. Raw, and bare. The good, the faults, the weaknesses, the unique, the superpowers, the whole lot. ✌🏽