A story about Startup

Last week I went to a technology conference in Detroit and met James Conway, a former student who also attended the conference. We decided to have dinner together, and he told me about his startup experience.

James began: “After graduate, I worked for Microsoft as a software engineer. In a small team to build tools for Window, I learned a few things to be successful, but my working life was boring, so I asked myself: “What could I do? In a large company, you are just a small cog in a very large engine, as long as the engine is running well, you are safe. However, I was young and full of ambition, I wanted to challenge myself on something difference. After carefully planning, together with a few friends, I started a company.”

“When you start a company, your life will change completely. In just a few weeks, I learned a lot about stress. Instead of going to work and come home like others, I stayed in my small apartment with seven people working ten to fourteen hours a day. Instead of going to lunch with the team, we ate “Instant noodles” almost every day to save money. We learned to set up system and database by ourselves without any help. Instead of asking sales and marketing person about the market trends, I had to meet with customers every week to learn about their needs. Instead of write weekly report to managers, I had to document everything and counted every dollar we spend to make sure that we did not exceed our limited budget.”

“An entrepreneur must constantly monitor the market to identify competitors and ready to compete. For team members, the daily monitoring was very stressful because we were under enormous pressure to make sure our product was better than others. At Microsoft, I never have to worry about risks, but having a startup means you had to deal with risks every day. Some technical risks were easy to fix, but financial risks were more difficult to solve, and market risks were impossible to predict. As an entrepreneur, you learned that the startup controls you and your daily activities. When things go ups and downs, your emotion was also ups and downs as well as your blood pressure. When we fixed a problem, team members would laugh out loud for joys, but when things were out of control, the whole team went mad, and personal conflicts began to happen.”

“A startup must move fast as an opportunity only happens once. If you missed it, it is gone. In the sixteen months working for our startup, we never had time to see movies or going out on a date. I did not have a girlfriend, but others did, and they all broke up. One angry girl told us: “You are all crazy and ruin your lives for the most stupid thing.” My friends in Microsoft also told me that by leaving a good job and chasing after an illusion, I was crazy too.” It took us more than a year to develop our product, but we could not get any investor interest in what we do. We had a few customers, but our revenues were not good even all of us were working with no salary. That was the time when you evaluated your team members to determine whether they still believed in your vision or not. A good team would stay with you, no matter what happened, but you could not expect everybody to behave the same. Some people began to come late and left early; others had excuses for being sick. It was impossible to keep the team intact when things did not happen as they wish. That was the reality of startup. If anybody says “startup is easy,” I can guarantee that person never start anything.”

“Despite all the turmoil, I kept myself calm, although inside, I felt like I could die. My friends who shared my dream were rejecting my vision, and some began to look for another job. Since I could not keep them, I had to let them go their way and began to recruit others. I went back to Carnegie Mellon many times, but no students wanted to work for a struggled startup for no money in exchange for a piece of the company. Try to get investors to invest money was more difficult than anything else that I face in life. I had to deal with many rejections until one investor agreed to give me some money just to keep the startup stayed alive.”

“If I stayed with Microsoft, I would never have to worry about anything. My life would be wonderful and I can get a good salary and may be knowing some girls to go out on Saturday night. But being an entrepreneur is hard and lonely, I had to work harder than anyone to overcome these problems. No one teaches me about this, and no one warns me about this. I saw many “startup” seminars with hundreds of students attending with a dream of being rich or being somebody. No one even mentions how difficult it is to start a company. However, I live with my dream although it affected me in the deepest emotion of my psyche. I still remembered your advice: “Anything happens for a reason, as long as you learn from it, you are maturing.”

He smiled: “I know that I am learning and maturing. I am here to present my product to people who attend the conference and hope somebody may interest in it. Each year, I attend about fifty technical conferences, all over the world, looking for customers and investors. So far, I am not successful yet, but I still have hope.”

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University