Some thoughts on the start-up life this afternoon:
1. One month equals a quarter and one year seems like five.
2. The spokes-person or the spokes-people.
3. Gen-Flux: are you bracing for upheaval
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1. One month equals a quarter and one year seems like five.
This may be of no surprise to you… but, in the start-up world everything is urgent. This urgency is not bad or good… it just is.
“…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
- Hamlet, speaking to Rosencrant
I think what Shakespeare was saying in this iambic pentameter prose, is this: only in looking back do we have the space to judge whether an action can be categorized as good or bad. In the moment judgement is given no quarter, only action and progress.
In the start-up world nothing is more truthful than this sentiment. As the future of the company leans on the progress of today. Yes, we can look back on last week and learn. Realizing which decision and subsequent action was a good play, and critiquing the bad ones, always learning, always implementing, always moving. And in this movement we look up every once and a while and realize the work that has been done equates to months of productivity mashed into the confines of a 30-day cycle. Then in a moment of celebration we sigh, one of those contented after a good meal sighs, take off our headphones and share a pint of barley. Crashing down on our pillows we dream of API integrations and organic user growth strategies… Only to be awoken at 5:30am to the smooth sound of Jack Johnson’s “Anything But the Truth” from our Alarm Clock Pro app on our iPhone, allowing his acoustics to propel us again, into the urgency that is Dwolla.
2. The spokes-person or the spokes-people.
My buddy Tony spurred some thinking this morning, with this post on brand influence. It seems in a pre-social media (read: social empowered) world the norm was to restrict brand engagement to the requisite spokesperson, thereby vaulting (as Tony states) the brand, the organization or the spokesperson themselves (usually the CEO or President), above the minions who actually run the show. But in a era of participation, where each cog now has a voice of their own, we are seeing varying degrees of response from said corporations accustomed to controlling the voice.
