“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.” ~David Whyte
“…I’m a magic fairy!!”“This is bad.” He had called me four times in a row not leaving a message. Each time, I had ignored the call because I hadn’t recognized the number. When the phone rang the fifth time, I remembered. Remembered the office number. Remembered his name. Remembered that he was a doctor. Remembered that a week ago he had punched a hole in my daughter's arm. Remembered the fear in her eyes when she saw the needle. Remembered thinking that she knew it was not going to be ok. Remembered the cool iPad app that he used during the exam. Remembered the way the mole that had grown too fast on her arm looked when it bled. Remembered he had said it would take a week. Remembered that it had been a week. Remembered the day job I felt was eating my soul. Remembered that I had good insurance through that job. Remembered the spelling words and word problems I had helped with the night before. Remembered the moment I knew my marriage was ending. Remembered the flight we were supposed to be taking in a few days. Remembered that this trip was supposed to save us. Remembered wondering when we would be able to admit we weren’t going to make it. Remembered the impossible to-do list running two startups and mentoring others had created. Remembered wondering how the fuck I had gotten myself here in my life. Remembered my favorite flavor of ice cream. Remembered the best run I had ever had. Remembered staring all night long at her perfect little button nose and rosebud mouth the night she was born. Remembered how she almost died three weeks after she was born. Remembered her running around in her fairy wings and ballet shoes when she was five screaming through her laughter, “You can’t catch me! I’m a magic fairy!” Remembered when we cut her hair for the first time. Remembered to answer the phone before it went to voicemail. Remembered to say, “Hello?”Remembered to say, “Thank you.”
While the number is on the rise, as few as 1,000 kids a year are diagnosed with melanoma. Melanoma is an adult cancer, occurring most commonly in adults over the age of 55. And while some forms of pediatric melanoma have causes similar to adult melanoma (e.g., UV overexposure), spitzoid melanoma has no known cause. Data and statistics can vary, but since 1948 when it was first diagnosed, fatality rates in girls between the ages of 9–11 are grim, hovering between 51–85% mostly because they are caught too late.
My daughter was 10, slathered in sunscreen from birth, and magic.
There is no cure for melanoma. Treatment — if you can really call it that — is limited to surgery or, for some late stage cases in kids, one form of immunotherapy — Interferon alpha-2b.
But here’s the deal: When cancer is caught in late stages, it’s too late. Treatments for late stage cancers are less about the children trying to live and more about the world using the last bits of their life to learn.
Like my daughter, spitzoid melanoma isn’t easy to classify. Of the usual ABCDE observables or measurable elements used to identify early indications and warnings, only E — Evolution — comes close to providing clues some of the time. In eight months, what started out as a nanospeck of dark pigment barely even noticeable to the naked eye became a micro-mountain of rounded red flesh that would change our lives irrevocably.
The day I told my daughter she had cancer was a hotter than hell blue sky day in the middle of July. I remember the color of the sky so vividly because most July days in Virginia the sky is an oppressive, opaque white. I had come home from work, changed my clothes, and made a dinner I couldn’t eat. I remember calling her back into the dining room after I had cleaned the kitchen. I remember sitting her in my lap and feeling flooded with grief that she didn’t fit like she had as a baby and wishing she were small again and I could hold her fully. That if only somehow I could rewind our life clock, I could fix it all, be a better mother, a better wife. I pressed my face to hers and could smell watermelon shampoo in her perfect hair and sweat at the nape of her neck. I remember her saying, “What’s wrong, mommy?” and knowing I had blown the first piece of advice: Try not to look upset or worried. I told her that her mole had been a cancerous tumor. That we had found the best doctors who were experts in this kind of cancer and who were going to help take care of her. That we would be going to meet them the next day and that she would have to have surgery soon after. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. She didn’t cry. She just looked at me and asked, “Am I going to die? Am I going to lose my hair?”
The hardest thing I have ever had to do was tell my daughter, “No. You are not going to die.” Not because I didn’t want to believe it. Not because I wasn’t willing to do everything and anything I had to do to prevent her from dying. But simply because the truth was she knew it might not be true and she knew that I was powerless and unable to make everything ok.
Three years on, we are not the same people but what I learned was that in the midst of everything that breaks, becomes lost, and changes out from under you, you will find a clarity so lucid that only those that can hold their own with you will remain in your focus.
During this same time, I held down a day job, co-founded a startup community, launched my own startup, hosted Startup Weekends, ran bootcamps, taught entrepreneurship classes at a local community college, co-created Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for entrepreneurs, and mentored hundreds of startup founders, some of whom would go on to be more successful than me. In retrospect, all of that — all of the responsibility, the requirements, the obligations, the output — is probably what kept me from coming undone.
A few months ago, I walked away from all of it, from most of my life as I had known it, built it, sold it. I was exhausted. My own startup had failed. I was tired of the incessant demands on my time that had no return for me and fed up with the noise of big ideas that weren’t that big. I wanted eight hours of sleep a night. I wanted to focus. I wanted to read a book again. I wanted to process the last three years of my life and recover. In these last few months I have spent a lot of time thinking about the strange and powerful clarity that came to me shortly after my daughter was diagnosed and how it enabled me to do what needed to be done, to see what others couldn’t and to focus within when there were too many unknowns around me.
Being a startup founder is a precarious, lonely journey riddled with uncertainty, obscured by the fog of bad ideas, poor execution, and incessant noise, and a massive hit on your emotional and financial reserves. It is, ironically, more like discovering, fighting, and surviving cancer than winning the lottery.
What follows are 20 lessons I learned after my daughter’s diagnosis that are as true for cancer as they are for being a startup founder.
1. You won’t see some signs until it’s almost too late. When you see them, it’s more important to act than to panic.
I had noticed the little freckle on her upper arm when it first became visible because other than a mole on her neck that was exactly like the one on my stepson’s neck — even in the same spot — she had no freckles. I wrote it off as an inevitable part of the changes being brought on by the puberty that was inbound. Months later, when it had slight dimension, I asked her if it hurt, or was itchy, or bled. At worst, she said, it was annoying and nothing more. But I felt a twinge of unease anyway and then, a few weeks later she came to me and said, “Mom. Something’s not right”, and lifted her shirtsleeve to show what was now a mound twice as large, shedding, and slightly bloody.
There are moments when you know you are in trouble and the impact of that trouble is exponentially higher than it would have been if you had seen and paid attention to the signs it was coming. This was one of those moments.
Guilt, fear, doubt about my ability to be a good mother, and anger with myself for being focused on all the other things that I had going on hit me hard, fast, and below the belt. My worst fear was there, on my daughter’s arm in front of me. In moments like this there is only one choice to make — choose yourself, or choose the other person. If I had chosen myself, I would have allowed the terror of losing my daughter and the undeniable belief that it was my fault take control. Instead, I picked up the phone and started calling every dermatologist between DC and Charlottesville.
When you make the decision to do the startup thing, you are stepping into a myriad of unknowns where the experience and expertise you have from other realms of your life won’t be enough. You are inherently outnumbered, outgunned, and outpaced by the enormity of the choices you will have to make. To say it is overwhelming is like pretending tsunamis can be surfed.
There will be some actions you will take, decisions you will make, and goals you will achieve that will give you enough of a buoy to keep your chin above the water line but you cannot possibly imagine the sheer matrix of unknowns that will come at you. Your line of sight will be obscured by many things and one day you will see in front of you something capable of taking you out. Your first inclination will be to wonder how in the hell you missed it or to double down on self-flagellating for not having reacted sooner or to freak the fuck out because you know you are in some deep shit.
But here’s the deal. In that moment when you see it, the best thing you can do is the opposite of what you feel, taking any action that will instead move you towards the problem because action is the enemy of powerlessness and it is the powerlessness — not the circumstances in front of you — that is fatal.
2. Timing is everything and you have no control over it.
The dermatologist who did the first biopsy — the one who saved my daughter’s life — was young, unconventional, and deliberate. He used iPads, was working with a coder-friend to invent a better in-office diagnostic tool, didn’t treat anything as routine, and used his network to get the right answer. His approach to the daily tasks of his operation made the difference between life and death for my daughter because he caught an insanely aggressive, anomalous cancer in what appeared to be the early stages. How we ended up with him was equal parts the result of my own fuck up, time latencies I had no control over and luck.
Sometimes, when you find out your child has cancer and the crush of fear folds your chest in on itself, you will be standing in a Wegman’s cafe full of people with kids like yours, listening to Dora the Explorer yelling at Swiper the Fox in the background with a couple of wannabe startup founders you just bought dinner for waiting for you to tell them things they will just end up ignoring. Sometimes, when people who have no idea what it means to be a mother because they are still kids themselves ask you if everything’s ok, you will tell them everything’s fine. Not because you don’t want to upset them or because your own kids are nearby but because you know it isn’t and you don’t feel like trying to explain things they couldn’t understand and then having to make them feel like it’s ok when they want to be sympathetic and sympathy isn’t enough.
When you take the leap into Startupland, you will hear a lot of bullshit about timing. It will be held up as the Holy Grail, revered like a god, dissected like a good spy story, and used as a tool to pressure you to move at someone else’s speed.
The reality is, timing is relative. You can no more bend time or optimize for it than you can change the weather by riding a bike. The truth is every action you take, every step you take — no matter whether it’s forwards, sideways, or backwards — influences the impact of timing on you and your startup. Not the other way around. It’s a numbers game and if you want to be on the upside of it, you need to increase your odds by taking as many actions and steps as you can, every day, no matter where you are, what you know, and what might happen next. Doing trumps timing every time.
3. You are going to fuck some things up. To learn, you have to get over it.
It took me three months to get an appointment with that first dermatologist. From the minute I started calling, every office I called had a 4–6 month waiting list. I called every day, 10–12 places a day for three MONTHS and got nothing. On the last call I made, I begged a nurse on the phone to do anything she could to get us in and asked her, “If you were me and this was your daughter, what would you do?” She said, “You know, if you call your pediatrician and go see them first and they think something is wrong, any dermatologist will get you in that day.” I almost threw up in my mouth. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have fucked up something so obvious and so simple? What kind of mother was I? Why didn’t I ask that question when I made the first call three months ago?
The honest answer is that I thought that I knew what I was doing. I had not called my pediatrician first because my pediatrician wasn’t a dermatologist and I wanted to skip that step and get straight to the right person. This one choice cost me three months of my daughter’s life. There aren’t enough priests in red velvet boxes around the world to take the guilt I still feel away. For a while, that guilt was a black hole in the center of my chest, crushing me. The first three days after her first dermatologist had called me to say it was cancer, I couldn’t look my daughter in the eye. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror when I was brushing my teeth and I thought that I would die from the tightness in my chest. On the fourth day — the day I got clear about everything in my life — I knew that to make the best possible decisions for her I was going to have to forgive myself, get over what was done, and focus on what wasn’t and still needed to be.
The early stages of a startup are like wading in an alligator infested swamp, late at night, drunk, with a couple of good buddies who are also drunk. It’s terrifyingly fun, exhausting, stupid, and sprinkled with moments of, “What the fuck was I thinking?!” Like parenting, you develop a certain innate sense of how and where to step that works for you and your drunk buddies right up until the moment it doesn’t. When that moment hits, it hits. And, make no mistake about it, the next one is lining up. You are going to fuck things up. You are going to delay when you should have moved out. You are going to turn away when you should have turned to. Some of your friends are going to leave you alone in the dark. A few people will get eaten by alligators or drown. If you spend the moments right after you are hit feeling stupid, cursing your arrogance, and berating yourself for not seeing it coming, you will create more delay, turn further away, and get more people killed again and again and again for the same fucking stupid reasons you did it the first time.
Your primary responsibility as a startup founder is to learn from your mistakes and teach what you have learned to those who depend on you to lead so they won’t make them too. Your ability to learn is the only chance your startup has for surviving. Period. It’s called evolution. The first lesson startup founders need to learn and put into their daily practice is that growth requires letting go of everything you thought made you right.
4. You won’t always know what to say and you will still need to say it.
Pediatric Oncology wasn’t managing my daughter’s case. They were consulting. She was a child with a grown up cancer so her case had been given to the melanoma specialists and oncologists who treated adults.
As the pediatric oncologist who called me to let me know that this decision had been made said, “You’d be better off if she had leukemia because we know what to do with that.”
I was terrified to tell my daughter she had cancer because saying it would make it real and I didn’t have any answers and I wasn’t sure how to keep my own fear in check so that it wouldn’t add to hers. The patient advocate I called for advice on how to say what had to be said was young, lovely, childless, and doing the best she could to help. The advice she gave made perfect sense and was easy to digest over the phone and utterly meaningless because what I really wanted was for her to tell me that my daughter didn’t have cancer.
You are going to have to say and do hard things when you are the founder of a startup. You are going to have to kick out your co-founder, bounce straphangers, fire employees, tell your investors you’re belly up, tell customers you failed, or even walk away. There are no easy conversations when things are on the line and if you avoid having them, shit will blow up. Often, we avoid hard conversations because we are afraid of the uncertainty that lies on the other side of them and we presume that space is an alligator infested swamp.
The best thing you can do is say hard things as soon as they need to be said, simply, truthfully, and without largesse. When you do this everyone can move more immediately into the space where action can be taken because they have information. Your job as a startup founder is to reduce uncertainty. The fastest way to do this is to test the waters by going in them yourself. You can’t be afraid of the consequences of things that have to be said. You need to be more afraid of the consequences of not saying them.
5. You will never only have to deal with one crisis at a time.
I found out my daughter had cancer at 715PM on July 13th 2013. A few hours before that Bank of America officially notified me that the short sale on my house I had been fighting with them for 12 months to get approved was finally approved. Months before that, my pay had been cut by 20% at the same time my stepson, who was battling a horrific heroin addiction, was arrested and imprisoned and the money we had spent trying to get him help — rehab, legal, etc., — had devastated our savings. At the same time, my marriage was ending and my parents and brother and I had had a massive falling out a few months earlier, In addition to losing my ass, my entire support network had disappeared.
Everything in my life was blowing up all at the same time.
In hindsight, the 12 month ordeal that Bank of America put me through gave me a new, daily practice in discomfort. I am, by nature, high energy, intense, and driven to make things happen, to build things, to move things, to change things. It’s a hardwired compulsion which — once I stopped trying to fight it — became a power tool. This compulsion is also my medicine, the antidote to stress, to fear, to boredom. And this tool was utterly useless in my fight against Bank of America. I was a David without a stone in a cage fight with Goliath. After three months of going hard at the problem I realized I was fighting something much bigger than me and that the real power puncher in the fight was someone I would never know or see, obscured by layers of hired guns. One night, after a call that ended badly for the Bank of America rep on the other end, I remembered an incident that had happened shortly after I had quit college, moved home, and experienced a bad breakup. A few of my childhood friends — all guys — had heard about my breakup and in true bromance form had been trying to get me out of my sadness and into the nearest bar where we could pound beer, tell raunchy jokes, and dance until the sun came up. These guys were my best friends and they were the last people I wanted to see until one night they showed up at my house and literally pulled me out of the door. Hours later, after we were kicked out of the last bar left open in our small town, we scurried down the backyard hill of some stranger's house, ditched our clothes, and jumped into the river. It was a hot night, the water was silky and cool and we were snorting with laughter right up until that moment we realized we were being pulled downriver and going under.
Luckily, we were too drunk to panic and, like drunk buddies do, started laughing about the fact that we were drowning.
At one point as I was moving downstream I looked to my left and saw a sapling sticking sideways out of the riverbank and shouted out, “Hey fellas, it’s Hands Across America Time!” and grabbed the sapling. One by one we created a human chain and I reeled us in to the bank where we shimmied up to the top and ran, naked and covered in river mud, a couple of blocks back to the house where our clothes were.
What was in my mind now, after hanging up with Bank of America, was the understanding that I needed to get still. To not panic, or hide, avoid, bemoan, or fight my discomfort but instead just quietly acknowledge it and let it be there with me. When new and jarring developments would occur with the bank — or my stepson, or in my marriage, or at the job I had at the time — I would do the same thing, and eventually, stillness became another power tool.
I learned that things are morbidly uncomfortable right up until the moment they aren’t. How long discomfort lasts is directly proportional to how much you try to make it stop, go away, feel better than it does, or act like it’s not there.
By the time my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, I had two well developed tools to get me through the crisis phase and navigate our new normal.
If you think for one minute that you will get the startup dream without the startup nightmare, you’re not qualified to be a startup founder. If you think for one minute that most days there won’t be three or four serious things blowing up around you that are YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to deal with, you need to fire yourself and go rent some movies.
The reality for startup founders is that most days you are facing sucking chest wounds, are understaffed, out of supplies, and have more casualties on the way. The best thing you can do for yourself and your team is to not make it worse by freaking out, hoping they will go away, or pretending that sucking chest wounds aren’t fatal. If you want to make it, you need to cultivate mindfulness and stillness. Follow the ABCs — stay aware, be where you are and control what is right in front of you and yours to own. Becoming good at knowing what you can and can’t do and getting good at bending without breaking or falling over is a critical startup founder skillset.
6. Your job isn’t to make people feel better. Your job is to do your fucking job.
When my daughter was diagnosed, I felt obliterated. I wished that it was me that had been diagnosed, not her. I wished that they had made a mistake. I started hoping that maybe they were wrong and I felt out of my element, uncomfortable with letting strangers with more knowledge than me take command of my daughter’s life.
Within the first few days of her diagnosis I was scheduling closing times for the house, working through the final stacks of paper for the banks, negotiating with bank negotiators, agents, and buyers, postponing flights and reservations, consulting and arguing with insurance companies, researching spitzoid melanoma, scheduling consultations with oncologists, talking to pediatric oncology patient advocates and dermatopathologists, looking for a rental, reserving moving trucks, packing up my life, going to work, making dinner, checking homework, feeding the dog, reading bedtime stories and all of the other normal tasks that had been part of my everyday life.
In the midst of this, all I really wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up with a superpower or a miracle that would make things better for my daughter but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make her cancer go away. I couldn’t invent a cure. I couldn’t guarantee her that everything would be ok.
In hindsight, I was so very lucky to have had so many things to do that I didn’t have time to stop and think about any of it because if I had even for one moment paused I am certain I would have broken and been unable to do what needed to be done.
When you are a startup founder, bad things are going to happen to you that make you so afraid you will feel violently ill. They will happen at the worst possible time and they may very well be things you can’t overcome. You will feel alone, vulnerable, and at the mercy of something more powerful than you, totally out of your league, and you will have partners, investors, friends, spouses, advisors, and employees who will look to you to make everything ok. And make no mistake about it, that thing you are at the mercy of IS far more powerful than you.
If you spend one second of your time trying to make any of these people feel better or trying to make things ok, your startup will go under. Your job is to make the phone calls, learn what you can as fast as you can, negotiate, find reinforcements, make the numbers work, establish new partnerships, unload what you don’t need (including people), streamline operations, and make sure other people are doing their jobs.
You cannot be slowed down or distracted by trying to make things ok because ok is subjective and its qualitative nature will burden you with a set of expectations you will never be able to meet. Your only focus needs to be on getting what needs to be done, done. Do your fucking job. Every day. And if you have to, do more. Nature hates a vacuum and the land of OK is devoid of oxygen and where startups go to die.
7. The person with the least power will try to own you. Master one shot, one kill.
Everything about my daughter’s cancer was rare and because of this the dermatopathology lab in Philadelphia decided to have her biopsy reviewed by an expert who ran another lab in Boston and so sent her biopsy there. I had already begun coordinating with her team of specialists who were in Baltimore and needed her biopsy sample so that they could have their own dermatopathologists review it prior to surgery.
What should have been a minor procedural change became one of the worst cases of cock-blocking I have ever encountered. My daughter’s specialists had contacted the lab in Boston to have the sample express shipped to them. The doctor who ran the lab in Boston was on vacation for two weeks and the office manager at the lab was refusing to release the sample despite the fact that the other lab, the original dermatologist, and now her specialists had all officially requested that she do so. The oncologist called me to let me know that they were going to have to delay my daughter’s surgery unless they could get the sample within the next 24 hours and they didn’t want to delay her surgery because they were alarmed by the characteristics of her tumor. I asked them for the number of the lab and called the office manager myself.
I told her who I was, what I needed her to do, and why. “I don’t know who you think you are”, she said, “and I don’t know how you got my direct number but let me very clear with you: you have no authority here. This is a chain of custody issue and I will not release this sample until doctor returns from vacation. I seriously doubt two weeks will make that much of a difference.”
The world is filled with people who suck and when given enough of a taste of power they will wield it like a broadsword every chance they get.
Usually, my first inclination with people like this is to disarm them. I treat interacting with them the way hostage negotiators talk hostage takers out of the building. Throwing their back up against the wall will nine times out of ten guarantee you a failed outcome. So, I explained my situation one more time and then asked the woman on the phone, “If it was your daughter who needed this biopsy sent to another facility so that they could save her life, what would you want your lab to do?” She said, “Your problems don’t change our policy.”
So I said, “I am going to give you one of two options. You can get the doctor who is in charge while your boss is on vacation the paperwork that needs to be signed to release and ship the biopsy sample or I am going to get a court order instructing you to hand that biopsy over and if that is the route I have to take, your boss can explain to every major TV network why I had to do that.” She replied, “Listen, you don’t understand. This is about chain of custody.” to which I said, “No. You don’t understand. I brought that hunk of my kid’s arm into this world. Chain of custody starts and stops with me. This conversation is over because you are now wasting my time.” And I hung up the phone.
The truth is, I had no fucking idea how the hell I would get a Boston court to issue a court order five hours before courts closed. But she didn’t know that and I was more than ready and willing to drive to Boston that night so that I could be in a courthouse at 8AM the next morning and figure that shit out if I had to.
The thing is, these types of people also extract a false sense of power by controlling your time and the quickest way to find out if that’s the kind of person you are dealing with is to take back control of your time from them.
Five minutes later the phone rang. It was the doctor who was temporarily in charge of that lab calling to tell me the release paperwork was complete and the sample was awaiting pick up for overnight shipping to her oncologist. He had his office manager call with the tracking number an hour later.
Every startup founder I have ever mentored has what I call the “$10,000 man”. This is a guy who through a couple of standard mechanisms — joined your team at a hackathon, heard about your startup and wants to “help”, got connected to you through a family friend — wants to give you $10,000 in cash and in exchange wants to be the CEO, own 80% of the company, and call all of the shots from the phone in the cushy office at his day job. He thinks you are so fucking desperate for cash that you will agree that his money is worth more than it is. This guy is invariably older than you, experienced in a totally different vertical, and thinks because he has a 401(k) he’s an investor. This guy is a jackwagon who knows nothing but thinks his money entitles him to own your ass.
Every startup founder I have ever mentored also has to deal with a whole slew of other types of people who are the gatekeepers to the exclusive event, the investor, opportunity, candidate, or customer that is needed to get momentum, exposure, or help.
Being a startup founder is a lot like being road kill that’s not quite dead. The minute you are outed as “trying to launch a startup” you are at a disadvantage. Predators like the $10,000 man smell your fear and know that you are too stupid to understand that the last thing you should be doing is taking anyone’s money. The gatekeepers will believe you have no power, no authority, and are as useful to them as the walking dead.
The most important people skill startup founders should cultivate is what I like to call one shot, one kill. Give everyone one shot at explaining how they are going to help you ($10K guy), or why they can’t or won’t do what you need or want or asked. If their answer doesn’t meet your needs — and you have done due diligence on your need — kill the interaction.
Say no, hang up the phone, or walk away and spend your resources and time getting to the person who can help you get to the next step. The early stages of a startup are crucial to establishing good habits. Wasting time with people who don’t matter is like burning money because time is your most important currency.
8. Common sense is more important than protocol but if you don’t understand the protocol you won’t be able to exploit it.
After our initial consultation with the surgical oncologist, my daughter’s surgery was scheduled. She would be having a procedure called a wide local excision. This procedure starts at the site of the original tumor and then goes in a wide radius around the site so that oncologists can examine tissue beyond the margins of the original biopsy to see if any of the cancerous cells have spread. If they can’t find it in the margins, you are warned that it’s not a guarantee that it hasn’t and you are informed that the margin of error can be high in some cases. If it has, this procedure is then typically followed up with a sentinel lymph node biopsy. Sentinel lymph nodes are like gateways. If cancer is found in them, it’s a good sign that it has spread to other parts of your body.
A few days after her surgery was scheduled, I was driving to a meeting and I found myself wondering why both surgeries couldn’t be done at the same time. It seemed to me that if the objective was to know if and where this cancer had spread why wouldn’t we just knock both surgeries out at the same time and get the most possible data we could to make the right decisions. I called the oncologist and left a voicemail asking her the same thing. She called me later as I was on the way home, explaining that it wasn’t protocol to do both surgeries at the same time.
The protocol concern seemed misplaced to me. Here we were dealing with a cancer that is rarely ever seen and is more aggressive in children than in adults and that, to my knowledge, didn’t follow any established protocol. And while the oncologist explained that standard medical protocol with surgery was to only do those surgeries that were necessary, it seemed to me that we had a good case of necessary.
At one point I asked her if her if she was unwilling to do both surgeries at the same time for ethical reasons or just primarily because of standard medical protocol. I needed to understand the root of her resistance because I wasn’t going to waste time trying to convince her if it was either or both. I would instead spend that energy finding an oncologist who saw value in getting as much information as possible in one shot. Her reluctance was tied to her desire to follow standard protocol but when pressed, she agreed to do both surgeries and both results came back clean, giving the strongest data indication that we had caught my daughter’s cancer early.
When you are a startup founder, holding onto protocol is one of the quickest ways to get eaten alive. There is no protocol in Startupland. People believe a whole myriad of myths and accept a whole lot of anecdotal evidence as proof of what should be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done. The dirty secret is the most important thing you can do also happens to be what makes the most sense to you even if it’s not how things normally get done because you have more situational awareness of the parts of your startup that matter.
Don’t waste a lot of time explaining what you want done to people who have already made up their minds about how you ought to do it. You are broke, in a desperate situation, and have few resources to marshall. If it makes sense to you, be clear about why and be clear that it does makes sense. Plenty of half-baked founders insist that what they are doing makes sense when in fact it does not. If you can’t show a tangible, measurable benefit to the action you are considering and the outcome you are going for, it doesn’t make sense. If you have to deal with protocols, regulations, or rules, don’t ignore them. Study them, find their weakness, and exploit them. Know your target, aim, and shoot straight.
9. To keep your shit together, you need to fall apart.
For the first three days after my daughter was diagnosed, I was a hot mess. I did everything I was supposed to do and held it together at the office, in the kitchen at home, dropping the kids off at school. I cried in moments that I was alone and choked on my own fear anytime I tried to eat or drink or brush my teeth but by day three I knew if I didn’t get my shit straight I wasn’t going to be able to make the decisions that needed to be made. So I sucked it up, tucked it away, and got to work.
One month after her surgery, her diagnosis confirmed, and her prognosis hopeful but completely uncertain, I was at my desk at work and noticed a notification from Google about a new “Story” on my Goolge+ profile. When I clicked on the notification it showed two videos with my daughter in them taken in July. I opened them and watched as she moved the phone camera from the left side of her head then slowly to the right, then along the top, then down the length of her ponytail. The first one was silent. The second, slightly longer, ended with this:
“Mommy. I hope you don’t get mad but I just wanted to take a video of my hair so that if I lose it, I can remember what it looked like. Remember what I looked like with it. Love you, Mommy.”
She had taken them in the examining room during the first visit with her oncologist when we would find out the full extent of what we were dealing with. She had been sitting on the table while the oncologist and her team of residents talked to me about how interesting her case was and what would be coming next when she took these and none of us had noticed.
When the second video ended, I left my desk, drove to a nearby park and cried until I ran out of tears, my face was numb, and my lungs felt raw. At one point, I am certain, the sounds coming out of me sounded more like a howl than a human cry. By the time I was done, I had been there for 5 hours but it had felt like seconds. I felt heavy, like I was treading water in the deep end of the pool with jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt on. I don’t remember driving home. I don’t remember making dinner. I don’t remember going to bed. But when I woke up, I remember knowing that everything had permanently changed in my life. It was undeniable, clear, and right in front of me. There was no going back.
Startupland loves its myths, its movie-worthy hero’s journey, and its holy lands. In all of these, the struggle is depicted as something manageable, a mere, necessary blip of emotion before the view fades to black and it’s gone.
Here’s the thing: The pressures in Startupland on a founder are inhumane and unbearable. You are not built to carry them alone, much less all the time or well and you will have to carry most of them alone anyway, most of the time. If you do not allow yourself to break occasionally under the strain — to feel your sorrow, your upset, your fear — you will not learn how to bend.
The untold story of Startupland, the one that never makes it to the Big Screen or scores a book deal or gets told over and over again at every startup event between Palo Alto and Mumbai is the one of depression, despair, and death. Startup founders are innately different from other people so they start out life at a disadvantage for support, inclusion, and solace. The very thing that makes them the right fit for doing what others won’t isolates them from almost everyone and that isolation twists them into thinking that when things become too much it’s their fault. The guilt and shame of feeling inadequate renders them hidebound to the myth of the hero’s journey. Some of the world’s brightest founders — people who were putting that proverbial dent in the universe — have killed themselves because by the time they were no longer able to deny their pain all they wanted to do was be free of it.
There will be a day when the only way to get through the pain, stress, and upset roiling through you is to find a place and break, coming apart completely into little bits. It’s the most important journey you can take because falling apart allows the toxic pressures to come out and they will blow apart the bullshit that doesn’t actually matter, break the things that aren’t strong enough to sustain, and render to dust the things that you were holding tightly to that were blinding you, holding you back, or killing you.
Falling apart allows you to rebuild with a stronger foundation because you get to choose from the rubble only those things that add value when you put yourself back together and your definition of value will be more clear because what want wasn’t working will be gone. If you don’t fall apart, your foundation will become obliterated under the weight of things that don’t actually matter or add to your mission, your vision, or your life. Falling apart is what makes you human and you cannot sacrifice your humanity for someone else’s mythology.
10. You won’t always know what to do and it will be imperative that you find a focus.
What I remember most about the first three days after my daughter’s diagnosis was that I was only able to look at her face when she was sleeping. I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid to stop looking at her, afraid that if I did, when I awoke, she would be gone. I was exhausted, overwhelmed by the enormity of what I didn’t know, and uncertain of what the experts knew because there were so many anomalies in her tumor. I kissed her and hugged her and made idle chatter, reviewed her homework, made her dinner, brushed her hair, told her she was beautiful, and couldn’t look her in the eye. I couldn’t let her see my fear or bear to see my own failure reflected in her blue and gold eyes because I didn’t know if I could save her. My fear was growing larger than my own life, creating an opacity in my thinking, and making it hard for me to function. I was on the verge of shutting down and knew I couldn’t but wasn’t sure I could stop it from happening. I didn’t know what to do. So, I did the only thing that made sense — I defined the problem in one sentence and wrote it down.
My one sentence problem was this: I don’t want my daughter to die and I don’t have the information or resources I need to know how to keep her alive. Like we learn in first grade when they teach us the scientific method, I needed to frame the problem so that I could focus on something tangible. I had to read the words on the page to create something I could see and focus on so that I could figure out quickly what I had to do next and and then do it. I found historical medical archives documenting some of the first cases discovered in girls my daughter’s age. I read descriptions of their tumors. I read about the earliest doctor to discover it in children. I researched my daughter’s specialists to see what they knew, what research they had published, and who else had cited their work. I researched experimental treatments and genomic expressions and prevailing theories on the root causes of melanoma. I created a spreadsheet of information, people, tumor characteristics, outcomes, theories, phone calls. I referenced, cross-referenced, made cold calls, and analyzed everything I could find.
If I had stayed focused on my goal to make her cancer go away — to make everything ok — I would have gone under, pulling her with me.
If I could give startup founders one gift from this experience, it would be this: Fear is not tangible. It is made up shit.
Your job isn’t to be fearless. Your job is to reframe fear as something you need to understand better. Maybe what you need to understand is external to you — a market segment, a competitor, a legal issue, a rare cancer. Maybe it’s within — an emotional trigger, unresolved issue, or inability to adapt. Whatever the case may be, it is your moral imperative as a leader to get to the real issue driving your fear immediately, put it in your sights and get to work. If you can’t, you will fail because you will be focused on things that you can’t impact, that others can’t see and that no one but you will have clear sight of.
11. Do your research.
Writing down my one problem sentence gave me a slew of self-imposed tasks designed to make me smarter faster about what I was dealing with. I felt like a Commander preparing for battle and I was ruthless in getting everything and everyone I needed marshalled to my plan. When I went into to meet with oncologists and specialists and pathologists I had data, case studies, evidence, and a virtual library of information I had assembled. I knew about the unique characteristics of some of the tumors founds in the prepubescent patients first discovered by Sophie Spitz in 1948. I had a list of questions and an expectation of the type of answer I was looking for. I needed to measure not only my own assumptions but the willingness of her team to provide answers and — more importantly — look for them if they had not thought to answer that question before.
The research I did gave me good reason to worry that we were in some deep shit but it also gave me the language, the methods, and the tactics used by the leading specialists in the field so that I could communicate with them. More importantly, it showed me that these highly qualified people tended to look at this problem in children through a rather stale scientific lens. Very little information about genomics was present in this research. No research that I read had sought to find a correlation between estrogen and increased lethality. None of the research established patterns or histories of other cancers in the family genetics that might provide clues to the root causes of this cancer in kids.
This information gave me the power to make the best possible decisions for my daughter and — when required — to force the team of specialists to go outside their comfort zone, to stop hiding behind protocol, and to do something they hadn’t done before because I could provide specific targets for them to shoot for that had a return for them and for my daughter. My goal was to take what I was good at — thinking differently, data analysis, problem solving — and use it to drive this team’s approach to treating my daughter. She was more different than any patient with melanoma that they had ever treated and my job as her mother was to make sure they understood that the normal playbook wouldn’t be allowed. To do this effectively, I would have to understand what made them interested enough to deviate from it.
The number one sign that a startup founder isn’t worth my time is the answer to this question:”Who is your customer?”.
Take note: if you believe your customers are soccer moms, old people who don’t like to buy cars, health nuts who want better food, millennials, people with older cars that don’t have bluetooth and want to stream music, people with gluten intolerance, college kids with mobile phones, or people who want to improve their finances, you are not alone.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have gotten these answers from people or how they then struggle to understand why these answers are a sure sign that their big idea is not so big. If you can’t be specific about your market, you can’t be specific about the problem you are solving.
Unless you can create a machine that simultaneously puts a soccer mom in four places at the same time, has a well-balanced hot dinner on the table when everyone comes home from work/school/the soccer field/dance, checks homework, gets through bathtime, bedtime, and all the dirty laundry at the same time, packs the next day's lunch, keeps her body smoking hot for her aging husband, and checks in with her elderly parents to make sure they took their meds, you are probably not going to build anything that she gives two shits about because she is infinitely more complex than a census demographic.
In the age of online repositories of business news, government data, and social platforms there is no excuse for not understanding a few very specific problems and the specific people who have them. To actually understand if your research was good enough, you will also have to go offline and into the real world of living humans, putting yourself, your idea, and your assumptions out there to be validated or rejected. And you will have to do this over and over again until you get it right. Your challenge is to avoid confirmation bias. Most startup founders are so in need of being right that they are unwilling to get it right.
If startup founders do research they often look for data that reinforces their belief that they are on to something big. They will present confirming evidence that their idea is shithot and it will sound a lot like this: “Big Company XXX is doing it and has 500 million people using their app but ours will be better because of ” or “Nobody else is doing it. I searched Google and nothing came up”. This research is at best, comical and a self serving attempt at validation.
Your job when you are researching is, simply, to target a tribe and quickly become an expert on the ONE problem that is fucking up the daily existence of one set of people within that tribe. Google isn’t enough but it’s a start. To get research that matters, you need to go to your tribe. If you are only doing your research online, you haven’t found your tribe or a problem that matters.
12. To succeed, you have to know how to deal with yourself.
It’s been almost three years since that first phone call. In the time between then and now everything we had known to be true, that had defined who we were and how we lived, ended. We lost our home, my marriage crumbled, one startup failed and I walked away from all the other startup stuff I was doing. I changed day jobs, the kids changed schools, we moved and then moved again. Doctor’s visits still never feel routine and too often yield surprises. Cancer ushered in a new normal and this cancer — with its relative obscurity and unpredictable life cycle and insidious assault on what I cherished more than my own life — is here to stay.
In the weeks and months that followed her diagnosis, my daughter would have four tumors and her sentinel lymph nodes removed and begin regular visits with specialists. Sometimes, a routine checkup became a mini-surgery with scalpels, needles, and stitches. Sometimes, the tumors were benign. Sometimes we found them ourselves. Sometimes they were hidden in her perfect hair. Sometimes they were small, like a piece of dirt, barely noticeable until they were excised, their tentacled, bloody ganglia dangling from the doctor’s fingers.
The difference between who I am now and who I was three years ago comes down to one thing and one thing alone: asking the right question. One night, I came home to a house with no family in it. Just me and the dog and a new arrangement between my husband and I that was the result of financial strain and emotional weariness. It overwhelmed me and I found myself in a heap, wondering how the hell this had all happened and why it had happened. These two questions just kept tumbling around and around me and the longer they did the more despairing I felt.
And then a strange thing happened: This question came to me: “What were you getting out of it?” And all of a sudden I realized that the answer for what had happened to my life — the only answer that would matter — was the answer to that question and that answer was somewhere within me. Answering that question became my most important mission. If I wanted to be the person I was capable of being and live the life that felt authentic and was important to me, I had to understand what my deep and dark drivers were. Answering that question was hard. I had to get real and honest about some seriously fucked up shit in my head. But as I did it created space for something new — clarity.
When my daughter’s cancer struck it triggered an anxiety and a fear more powerful than anything I had ever experienced. In front of me was my worst fear — one or both of my children dying. It threw me into a world where I didn’t know the language, would have to rely on strangers, and had no control at a time when the foundations of my life were collapsing around me. Instead of seeing the destruction, I chose to see the opportunity. All around me were clear signs that how I had been operating in my life wasn’t working so instead of trying to save it I decided to use this clarity to my advantage and I let that shit go.
My daughter’s diagnosis taught me the difference between a real problem and a made up problem. It taught me that most of us are running around full of resentment and anger and angst due to the failure of the fantasies in our head which we have convinced ourselves we deserve to magically materialize. In the workplace this looks a lot talking shit about a coworker that has the job you think you should have or throwing a tantrum when you aren’t getting your way, or refusing to adapt to changes that are good for the rest of the team because you won’t feel you are as important/have as much control/have top cover, or maintain your status. In a marriage this looks a lot like giving attention to anyone that you think is better looking, more interesting, has a sexy accent, is obviously more loving and would definitely be a better fit for you than the person who has been by your side for decades despite the terrible shit you might have put them through. Inside your car this looks a lot like screaming at the person who cut you off because you know they did it on purpose. Inside your head this looks a lot going through the course of everyday reacting to everything as though the world around you is filled with problems. The truth is the problems around you are mostly made up shit. The harsh truth is most of the shit is of your own making — the broken fragments of delusional fantasies forged together by childish entitlement and an insatiable desire to be right without having to do the work to get it right.
Real problems are not of your own making, are rarely if ever under your span of control, are few in their numbers and are immense in their uncertainty. Made up shit is always a choice. If you don’t work hard to understand how you move through your day and why when a real problem happens you won’t have the clarity you need to deal with it and most of what you care about will be lost.
The sooner startup founders understand that uncertainty is is always going to be bigger, more powerful, and more present than they are, the sooner they can harness it. To harness it, you have to know the root of your compulsions and you have to fundamentally understand their influence on your behavior and decisions. If you don’t, your actions and your intentions will never be aligned and you will make catastrophic decisions and never understand why. This will doom you and your startup because when you can’t see yourself any vision you have is impaired. Your job as a founder is to stay clear. If you need a therapist, priest, monk, coach, or shaman to help you get one.
13. People you love, trust, and care about most will disappoint you. You must forgive them.
When my daughter’s diagnosis was confirmed, my husband was in Colorado visiting friends. He had driven out in advance of me in the kids who were going to fly and meet him and then road trip through Colorado and Arizona to see the Grand Canyon, the Rockies, and if we could save our marriage. When I first called him, I was distraught. He said, “Do you think I need to come back? Don’t you think you could wait until after our vacation to schedule the surgery?”
Not long after my marriage broke up I called one of my best friends. I needed to talk to someone who loved me, who knew me, who had known us, and who would be a voice in the darkness. I left voicemail after voicemail. Months later, when she called to say she would be in town if I wanted to swing by and see her, I asked her why she had never returned my calls. “I didn’t want to deal with it”, she said.
A year after my daughter’s diagnosis, a friend I had partnered up with on one of my startups went offline right before a milestone release. Phone calls, emails, and texts which had occurred with predictable regularity every day suddenly stopped. When I finally made contact, the whole thing exploded and we parted ways never to be friends again. Later I would find out that — unbeknownst to me and another person he was in business with — he had joined another startup and had dropped all work on ours.
During my daughter’s recovery and as I tried to put our lives back together I thought about these moments that had brought with them great disappointment, incensed anger, a sense of deep betrayal, and a feeling of isolation that was vast and brutal. In those moments, I didn’t have the energy to hold onto anger or sadness. For a while it was all I could do to show up in my life, But at the same time there were these little moments of peace and joy brought on by the most simple of things that would carry me through. Sometimes, it was the slant of sunlight on the kitchen wall or the smell of fresh cut grass or the sound of my kids breathing in deep, restful sleep at night. Noticing them became a daily practice, one that taught me the power of gratitude and the strength that comes with making peace with this one life we have. I learned that allowing others to find the path they have to take frees you to find your own.
When you are a startup founder you are going to lose a lot. You are going to lose time, friends, money, partners, and motivation. People you trust will betray you. People you love will leave. People you depend on will let you down. People who believed in you will stop believing in you. In the midst of all of this you will feel disconnected, adrift, and afraid and it will be critically important that you don’t give into anger.
Your job as a startup founder is to figure out how to recover quickly from loss, disappointment, failure, and disaster. Recovering quickly doesn’t mean suppressing or denying your emotions. It means that you set a target on the other side of them and then do the work it takes to get there. It means accepting the limitations of others not as reflections of what they are lacking but has indicators of where they are in their own journey and committing not to stall your own by focusing on theirs. It requires daily gratitude for the little things that you don’t have control over that make life beautiful.
14. To get it right, your vision has to be bigger than everybody elses.
My meetings with my daughter’s specialists were less about passively receiving their findings, their opinions, or their recommendations and more about making sure we were executing this mission as a team, maintaining situational awareness across all stakeholders, and constantly looking for the opportunity space. Sometimes, this created friction. In one instance I wanted pathology to genomically type her tumors. Their initial response was that it wouldn’t make a difference and they were reluctant to do it and so I didn’t stop until they did because in my view of the problem knowing the specific genomic expressions in this tumor not only allowed us to compare subsequent tumors in her — or god forbid my son if it occurred in him — but more importantly, it gave us the unique signature of her cancer.
I realized early on that nobody — not even these amazing doctors — had the vision of my daughter’s future that I did and that if I wanted her to have a chance in hell of realizing some version of it I had to make them see it so clearly they wanted it to.
My vision of my daughter’s future had all of the normal desires a mother imposes on her children once she knows they are coming — health, education, love, adventure, financial security, happiness, friends, and family. And then I added a new one: bioengineered cure for her cancer. I believe that if the age of information has one singular advantage over every other it is this: the Human Genome Project. Most of how we have prosecuted medical breakthroughs has been through research on diseases at scale and looking to find patterns within them across populations at scale. Much like a startup, medical advances are looking for a way to generalize specific problems to a large group of seemingly similar people. What the Human Genome project provides for medicine is the possibility that, with enough information about our own body and services that can model and map genomic expression, we have the information we need to custom engineer treatments and cures for individuals.
My daughter’s specialists are trained to do one thing exceptionally well — react to cancer. I needed them to change that paradigm and be willing to imagine a not so far off future where the genomic data they could collect might help her own body cure her. I needed to give them an opportunity to participate in something bigger than what was in front of them, under their scalpels, or in their files.
Startup founders have to be able to see what others can’t. They have to have a vision so big that it’s very size creates a dark matter powerful enough to carry others along with it. They have to be the sun in the systems of people, places, and things they are moving with every day. If they are anything less than that no one will follow. It is an enormous burden. It is an enormous opportunity. When there is nothing external to find faith in, you, the Founder, must have faith in the vision.
15. You will never be comfortable.
My daughter’s cancer is an aggressive, sneaky bastard. The standard protocol for the parents of patients diagnosed with it is to wait and watch. The obvious indicators that it’s back are moles that come up suddenly or moles that change. The sneaky signs that it’s come back somewhere inside of you — like your eye, your brain, your liver, your spine — are things that at any given point in a busy pubescent kid’s life would not necessarily raise concern — fatigue, headaches, mood changes. Doctors will use CT scans or MRIs only if there seems to be a “good reason” to look. Usually, by the time the reason is good enough to warrant them looking (and the insurance companies paying for it), it’s too fucking late.
Sometimes, we can go for months doing skin checks with nothing to report. Other times it’s a rapid fire sequence of events, indications and warnings. There is no such thing as a routine visit to the doctor anymore, even for a sinus infection. The process of going over your kid’s skin regularly and then teaching them to do it is mundane and tedious and because of this the risk of complacency is high. At the same time, staying on high alert is not sustainable and it will get you to complacency faster than the tedium. We live in constant discomfort. We do not have the luxury of getting comfortable with the mundane or accepting that anything is ordinary. To master this discomfort, I add to it by doing continuous research, by never allowing myself to assume that anything is common and by continuously disrupting the preferred strategy most commonly employed for dealing with her disease. Instead of fighting the discomfort, I have consciously chosen to harness it, to use it as a force multiplier for moving my knowledge and her team forward towards a better outcome. If this means I have to change her team, so be it.
When you are a startup founder the hardest thing to do is fight your own desire to be comfortable, to feel that everything is going to be ok and to get to a point where you feel less stressed and concerned. Even though this is a basic human compulsion, the problem with following this drive is that it leads you away from your success. Following it means you choose willful ignorance to avoid hard truths which might contain the information you need to have a breakthrough, make a change in staffing or refactor key partnerships or resources. Following it means that you will only consider evidenced-based data that shows you the good story you want to believe. Following it means that you do anything that keeps you feeling comfortable and this will get you completely disrupted by someone else who isn’t.
If you want examples of how dangerous comfort is as a way of conducting business, look at some of the most storied and impactful companies the US has ever produced. They had achieved market domination, marginalized or eliminated competition, and built a business model that had a long, sustainable tail. IBM, Standard Oil, American Steel, Kodak, and Xerox forged new markets, changed the face of modern American business, and then hit their stride. These companies enjoyed decades of success and when faced with market disruptions (or disruptors), instead of rethinking how they were doing business, adapting their long standing strategies and going outside of their institutionalized norms, they decided that their size and momentum was proof that their model for business was right. Of those five companies, only IBM managed to survive its own arrogance and then only after a loss of billions of dollars, several CEOs, a decimated global workforce, an epic slide in market share and market value, and the rise of more agile, hungry competitors all around them who were there to stay. In the end, to survive IBM had to think differently about who they were and what they did and set up a new way of operating, getting rid of leadership and workforce members who were completely unwilling to go outside of their comfort zone and rethink what it meant to be IBM in a new world order they didn’t control.
If you want to create a company — not just a product — that stays the course your job is to be bothered, agitated, and uncomfortable all of the time. Nothing should ever be good enough. There should never be a desired end state. You can never be satisfied with how things are. Your compulsions should be to master moments before they get to you and improvise as required when they hit. There is no singular strategy, plan, or execution path that will hold the course against the external forcing functions of the world around you. And the world around you is infinite.
16. If you don’t want to feel crushed by it, don’t hold onto it.
If there was one thing that I thought would take me out when my daughter was diagnosed it was the powerlessness to make it go away, to make everything ok for her and to restore her life to a healthy normal. For the first three days after she diagnosed I struggled to wake up, to move, to breathe. My chest was crushing me, my heart an Everest of grief and fear reaching higher and taking me into thinner air with every passing moment. On the third night I went into her bedroom to tuck her in, read her a bedtime story and hold her until she fell asleep. As she drifted to sleep I remembered a moment after my son when she had crawled into the hospital bed with me and to be held, to be reassured that she too was still my baby. Up until the moment I had held my newborn son in my arms, my daughter, then still 3, had felt so small, so in need of my protection, my love and my own fullness of life. But the moment she was with me in that hospital bed she was suddenly no longer the baby she had been. I remember being stunned at how big she was and feeling completely overwhelmed with this new realization of the size and space she now took up in my lap and my life. It was a profoundly bittersweet moment in mothering.
Now, in the bed with her — my beautiful magic fairy stricken by this deadly silent cancer — she felt small again in my arms against the fear that was in my chest. Call it weird, irrational or just plain crazy — I could care fucking less — but in that moment I vowed to never let the fear in my chest feel bigger than her in my arms. Not.Fucking.Ever.
I knew in that moment that I had to stop giving my fear a place to root and grow. I had to stop letting every moment with her feed it by wondering how far from the last it might be.
The human mind is programmed to let the Lizard Brain take over when faced with catastrophe. The evolutionary rationale is that if left to our rational devices we might think we could talk our way out of being eaten by a hungry saber tooth tiger. It is imperative, in this modern age, when faced with real problems, not to let the Lizard Brain take over and instead evict the fear, embracing instead those things that are more important.
Startup founders will be faced more than once with their own saber toothed tiger. It will leap out of a burned down runway, a shitty term sheet, a shitty partner, and frazzled team, or a shaky deal. The normal fear of failure that they live with will suddenly take a real, man-eating form and come at them.
The best thing a founder who is facing the tiger can do is this: put your arms around someone or something who matters to you, close your eyes, breathe, and let them become the largest thing you are holding on to. Your job isn’t to give into fear, your job is to find the thing you love more than fear. When you can make a daily practice of feeling what you love more than feeling what you fear you will be able to define the steps you need to take next. Putting one foot in front of the other is what matters most.
17. You will find your new normal. And then you will find it again.
For a few days after it was clear to me that my life had come completely and utterly undone and apart I felt adrift, floating through my days and my routine environments and daily encounters with other people as if I were a third party observer, witnessing the scenes but not really there. To be clear, it was one of the most liberating times of my life. I lost all sense of attachment to how things were, ought to be, and were going to go. Nothing was normal and I felt myself not wanting it ever to go back to that.
Nothing ever did. The pain, the fear, the enormity of change that took over my life was nothing short of worth it and almost like a violent rebirth in its own right. I remember talking to a dear friend months after I had started to move through my new world order and after a couple of glasses of wine and when I described what I was feeling to her she said, “It sounds as though there the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight” and I laughed out loud and confessed, “So funny you should say that because the other day I had this completely fucked up sense that I was finally crowning!” We both laughed until we cried.
We sold our house, my daughter had her surgeries, we crashed at a relatives for a couple of weeks, and then we moved. I switched jobs, the kids switched schools, my marriage finally crumbled, our new routine included specialists and more surgeries and tests, I walked away from a load of things I had started and started anew with my children, alone and tired but mostly but not completely unafraid. In three years we have had more changes than most people — with the exception of those facing severe wartime dangers, poverty, or extreme catastrophes — have had to face.
There are two types of people in the world — those who get shit done and those who done. Those who get shit done do not waste their time with or talking about those who don’t. They know that every day they wake up is a gift and they choose to make it a day where they can do something that matters. I am lucky that I was born the kind of person who needs to get things done to feel that my life has a purpose. It is single handedly the reason that when the world beneath my feet kept shifting I was able to find balance. I had learned that I was good enough to do it and that it was my responsibility to teach it to my children.
When you are a startup founder, there is no such thing as normal for most of your journey. Everything is moving — money, mission, vision, staff, partners, goals, tasking, market, competition. It is so quintessentially human to strive for stasis, to create a balance between input and output, to manage to the center of the axis. But the reality of a startup is the opposite of that. It is entropy. It is like the Theory of Everything all the time, everywhere, always. Your job as the founder is to accept it first so that you can figure out out to harness it. To find the patterns of opportunity in the disruption. To find the nuggets in the seam. To find the truth in the bullshit. If you strive only to create harmony, you will never have the perspective you need to see ahead of the curve, to anticipate change, to be flexible enough to dodge the bullet.
18. Celebrate what is working and is right.
Several months into my daughter’s diagnosis, one of my partners put together a business development summit. The goal of the summit was to get political, thought, and entrepreneurial leaders in our region together to identify and discuss issues, opportunities, and ways ahead.
Our little startup community — like so many of those other communities that Steve Case calls out in his Rise of the Rest tour — had some issues with launching itself into the bigger world of launches, venture capital, and brand name recognition. One our panelists, Bob Stolle, said something during a brief exchange with some of the participants about what made it hard for startups in our regions that rung so true with me it I live by it to this day: Don’t forget what you have that is working right, that gives you an advantage, that makes what you are dealing with better than some people have it because believe me, there are always people who have it so much harder than you do
Bob was right in so many contexts. Within our own great state of Virginia I had seen first hand regions of populations with generations of a family living in a single room wood cabin with no running water or electricity. I had seen far reaching corners of the state with few people, majestic mountains and rivers and one or two enormous factories that dumped solvents into the mountain streams that fed those rivers. I had seen my own classmates’ family farms go belly up in the first great recession after decades of productivity and family succession. In our community — a bedroom community of Washington D.C. — we had a lot going for us despite those things that weren’t. We were less than an hour away from the capital of the world, 150 different universities and colleges, the internet hub of the world, and airports that could whisk us away to anywhere.
I thought about Bob’s words often as we faced new tumors, new finding, and new unknowns with my daughter’s cancer. In the face of everything that was terrible about our situation, we had this: healthcare, a premier team of specialists, cars, money for gas, a roof over our heads, food, water, clothing, jobs, love — even if some of it was damaged beyond repair, grit, and hope.
Startup founders must develop a daily habit of noticing what is going right and take time to honor and celebrate it with their team. This is not an exercise in being the world’s best PollyAnnas. Instead, it is choosing to recognize where there is opportunity, where you are doing something exceptionally well and discovering where your strength lives. Even if the outcome is not what you originally thought it would be, it will be far more in line with what you had hoped when you focus on and celebrate what is going right because those things are what you will bring forward with you when everything else fails and falls apart.
19. What you thought you would be doing is not what you will be doing.
When my daughter’s cancer struck, my life was a shitshow on all fronts. My day job sucked and thanks to the economy and a rigid business model I had suffered a 20% paycut. Treatment for my stepson’s heroin addiction — or lawyers depending on what the particular circumstances were at the time — had created heavy financial burden, and my marriage was crumbling under the strain of that and the generalized dissatisfaction that can seep in over decades of togetherness. Our forever home which had almost doubled in market (and tax assessed) value within a year of building it was worth less than what we had paid for it eight years earlier. My 401K was down by 70%, and our savings was gone. My dream of a happy, healthy family with a storied life had become a nightmare.
To do what needed to be done — to stabilize the financial hemorrhaging, to stay clear, present and accounted for with my children, to keep pace with my daughter’s cancer, and to make the best possible decisions — I had to let go of my dream of a happy, healthy, financially secure family. I unloaded my house, accepted that my marriage was going to fail and that I would be a single mom with two kids sooner rather than later and stopped thinking about my own future for a while. I let go of being vested in outcomes and focused instead on simply making as many decisions as I could to get to the next step only.
Letting go of my dream was nothing short of devastating. It upended everything I thought to be true about myself, about my life and about my abilities to be good at something that mattered. But in that letting go, a strange thing happened — I found myself again and for the first time in years, despite the insanity around me, I felt at ease.
A lot of startup founders I work with (mostly the men, FWIW) have a clear and ever-present vision of themselves at the helm, leading their charges into the unchartered territory of greatness. They seem themselves scoring big investment rounds, blowing away the competition, and building teams of aces. They see themselves delegating, briefing, unveiling, being interviewed and being responsible for doing something big. When you ask them what are the top three things they are going to get done after they leave the coffee shop where they have met you most of their answers are self-aggrandizing bullshit — I’m going to call that angel investor I heard would be all over this, or I am going to finish that pitch deck and check in with the guys and see how the code is going, or, I’m going to with some . Their attention and their actions are solely focused on the their fantasy in which they are center stage and their big idea has become the next big thing. It’s truly some of the most nauseating shit I have ever had to sit through and it’s my litmus test for whether or not I will waste my time with them again because what they should have said were things like: I am going to be talking to 50 college kids and getting their feedback on feature X, or, I am going to go to the mall with a couple of mocked up interfaces and ask random shoppers outside of Costco to push the buttons, or, I am going to go to host a pop-up shop outside of the yoga studio and see how many sweatbands I can sell.
The reality for startup founders is more akin to mucking stalls than having a Jobs-like unveil in sunny California. If you ever want to see a profit or a term sheet you will have to talk to strangers face to face about your vision who won’t always understand what the hell you are saying or give you reliable feedback. You will have to put yourself, your shitty product, your dreams and your last dollar out there. You will spend countless hours on Google doing research and creating a repository of data to help determine courses of action. You will create a business model at 2AM only to revise it at 2PM because something you thought was true, wasn’t. You will code or learn to code and create multiple iterations of a product no one uses. You will have to learn how to navigate legal structures, financial documents, and labor laws. You will beg, borrow, plead, and negotiate with co-founders, lawyers, spouses, banks, and new hires. You will clean toilets and pull trash. You will spot paychecks from your savings and not take one yourself. You will be sucker punched by bullies. You will be deceived by people you trusted. You will have to clean up shit left behind by assholes you thought had your back. You will lay awake at night frozen with fear because everyday you will feel like you are on the edge of a cliff and feel tremors under your feet.
To be lucky enough to be able to experience any of these you have to know that your vision might be wrong. What is as if not more important are the myriad of little, unsexy things you need to do everyday. And what is more important than that is knowing when you need to change what you are doing and create a new set of priorities, a new set of actions, a new approach. If you are married to your vision, if it is what you go back to at the end of a shitty day, you are probably going to fail. Shitty days are filled with important indicators and early warning signs of where your vision is flawed. To succeed, you have to do what needs to be done next to correct course, to reduce the suck, to keep forward momentum, to reframe or redefine your vision. You will have to do it whether you want to or not and at the most inopportune time in your life. You might have to fire a rockstar coder, boot your co-founder, or totally kill your product and start over.
To know what needs to be done next, you have to embrace uncertainty and let go of your fantasy because your fantasy is a cloud. It is fluffy, opaque, fleeting, and 30,000 feet above you. By the very nature of its form, it prevents you from having the clarity and line of sight you need to take the next step.
20. Your startup is not your baby.
Like many people,whose pets are the substitutes for the children they never had or the children who have grown and entered the world on their own. Just to get this out up front, I choke down a little rage every time I hear these people refer to their pets like they are children.
As a parent of a child with cancer I would no more consider putting my child down because she has cancer than I would dropping a nuke on the Middle East to solve a problem whose origins are so complex and largely undiagnosed or understood. When I was a kid in college I knew a guy whose family was loaded. One of the buildings on our campus was named after his great-grandaddy. His parents had a 12 year old golden retriever who had a severe case of hip dysplasia. One summer, they spent $40,000 on hip replacements for that dog who ended up dying of natural causes two years later. I remember at the time thinking what a gross display of wealth that decision was. When my daughter was diagnosed I remembered wondering what I would do with that $40,ooo to find a cure for her and it was hard not to choke down vomit because I didn’t have it.
Here’s the deal startup founders of the world: I don’t fucking care how much money you or your stupid family or no-nothing investors sunk into your startup. As soon as you know it’s a piece of shit that has a terminal disease called NO ONE GIVES A FUCK you need to kill it. Period. Your startup is NOT your baby. It is only an idea you tried to bring to life. It is not your flesh and blood and even though it depends on you for life there is a greater penalty for not killing it when you should then treating it like an actual child you brought into the world.
I don’t know how to say this delicately so, apologies in advance. If you dare to consider your fucked up startup to be as something as precious and as deserving of life as my beautiful daughter you are an ego maniac with no fucking idea of what really matters, of what real responsibility is, and of what real love is. You are nothing more than an self-aggrandizing asshole and I hope your company fails so badly that TechCrunch and Forbes right about it for years to come as an example of how not to be a fucktard. The minute you know what you are trying to build is worthless, kill it. Your startup is not your baby and the sooner you kill it the sooner you might actually move on to do something that matters.