God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung
- Paul Westerberg
I was in a board meeting the other day at a company we have been investors in for a bunch of years. It is run by a small, great group of people, who built a good social product that did reasonably well - many users - but never broke out and achieved those hyper growth rates associated with services that have network effects.
Until this spring, when the service caught fire, adding hundreds of thousands (or more) of users a week, tens of millions of sessions a day, top 20 status in app stores the world over. Many things they had been thinking about for years started to work. At this meeting, I listened to updates from a bunch of the team members including the founder and in areas such as systems, community, product and analytics. And as I listened to these people I knew well and had heard from many times over the past few years, it occurred to me they had changed. It was not that they had suddenly become successful - after all it's early days and this company will face many more ups and downs in its journey. It was that they have been through a transformative business experience. Rebuilding a product on almost no budget, making gut calls and decisions, managing a massive growing, international and vocal community. They were now presenting to us as experienced business people, confident in their plans and in command of their data and themselves.
They now had experience. And it is going to be fun to watch what they do with it.
As amazing as it was to see, it also humbled me. For how could I possibly advise and counsel them on the things they had experienced? I know nothing about operating a distributed moderation team in multiple languages. Nor little about building a redundant real time system handling millions of requests a day with almost zero latency and no down time.
I remember when I started to work at AOL in mid-1990s and on my second day there I was told to negotiate and document a relationship with AOL's then-largest marketing partner, American Express. I was given the old deal to refer to, and little else. Everyone else was too busy to guide me. I cried at home at night with what seemed to be an insurmountable task - I had never done this before. But we got it done - I don't recall we even got it done particularly well - but it was done. The next deal we did was better because by then I had at least a modicum of confidence, of experience. The next one even better. I imagine in some way it got me here, so I can bank on that journey as my way to add value.
I've always been a big believer in the concept of the "beginner's mind" - that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” But I'm not so sure that principle is always applicable. A little experience also goes a long way, which I re-learned this week.