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Square One, Again

Posted by: davidkircos in life, startups, work 7 years, 7 months ago

I just ran into a founder of a company whom I've known for about a year.

When I first met her, she was already 1 year into building her business. At the time we met, the company was a 4 person team containing both an excellent designer a developer. They were heading into the Techstars program full of promise. Having already built a basic version of their product, ready to grow customers and make partnerships.

When talking today she said that within the last two weeks, the remaining two employees left the company and she was back to being the sole employee. It was obvious she was worried. But she was also hopeful.

In a position where she has a product to sell, it is now time to grind. Hustle. Make some sales and build the team up again from scratch.

What is really exciting is that her face still lit up when talking about the companies product. The passion is still there. The next half year will be pivotal. If she can keep making incremental progress, solid ground isn't too far from reach.

If there was one graphic I could show to my 23 year old self this would probably be it. #startups #entrepreneur pic.twitter.com/JPvGltKC5V

— John Fein (@johnfein) August 20, 2016

This illustration that John shared shows that success isn't a constant upward trajectory, rather a complicated path with many ups and downs.

Best of luck my friend! Now back to work...

The External Context

Posted by: davidkircos in blogging, life 7 years, 8 months ago

Suppose you have this system.

The properties of this system are:

• The green ball has a downward force acting upon it.
• Input: the starting slot (1-4)
• Output: the ending slot (a-d)
• You have no idea what happens in the middle.

The middle might look like this:

Or like this

The point is, you can not see what is happening in the middle and you only get to pick an input and be given an output.

Example: 2 maps to B. Remember, we don't know why.

Think of this as a highly simplified game of life. There are things that we have control over (inputs) and there are areas that we not only do not have direct control over but also can not see or understand the properties of (context). Choosing the inputs and applying the context gets us "somewhere" or (the output).

I believe it is very easy to spend too much time focusing on inputs and the outputs we expect, without giving enough thought to the context.

For me, the context of my thoughts and ideas has mostly been an internal conversation. Me thinking about things in isolation. This is a bad thing. Without forcing myself to formalize and be comfortable sharing ideas, it is too easy to let the wrong ideas take hold. This is why I'm blogging. To change the context of my thoughts. From my head to on paper (the internet). As an added benefit, I can practice writing.

While I believe the process of modifying context can be very difficult to predict the result of. I believe that my discussion here will, at least, result in the following modification of my context.

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