realandysparks

[realandysparks]

Failure, Depression, and Yoda

About two weeks ago, Tim Ferriss wrote a post called, Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide. It was painful to read, but Tim came forward and told an honest story about his battle with depression. Coincidentally, I was in the airport coming back from a conference where I gave a talk titled, The Truth About Failure. In preparing for my talk, I was finally able to put thoughts to paper and be honest about my struggle with depression. After reading Tim’s post, I knew my talk wasn’t enough. Below is my story. If you’re struggling with depression right now, especially if it’s related to failure, know this: everything will be all right. 

-- 

Isaac Asimov wrote a book called The End of Eternity. It’s a great science fiction novel about a world where time travel is constantly used to change history in order to eliminate catastrophes. The society Asimov created, called “Eternity," essentially rooted out failures. I think this passage is particularly relevant to failure, pain, and depression:   

“In ironing out the disasters of Reality, Eternity rules out the triumphs as well. It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests. Can you understand that? Can you understand that in averting the pitfalls and miseries that beset man, Eternity prevents men from finding their own bitter and better solutions, the real solutions that come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it?"  

In December of 2011, I was living in the Short North in Columbus, Ohio. I graduated from Ohio State about seven months earlier and was working for a company called Duet Health. I spent my college career avoiding classes in favor of side projects like home brewing beer, designing iPhone apps, and learning about what it took to start a company. After less than a year in the workforce I was antsy to start my own thing again. 

After a Startup Weekend, a mentor of mine threw an idea out to me. He had been arbitraging Facebook ads, it was working, but he didn’t have time to work on it anymore. He suggested I run with the idea. It was fairly straightforward: build landing pages for hotly anticipated consumer goods that have yet to be released (the next Call of Duty for example), target that product’s Facebook Page, run ads, and then have links to pre-order the products on each page. We would take an affiliate fee. We would eventually call it LaunchGram. 

I convinced a couple friends of mine to join up with me on the side. We got into an accelerator in Columbus that didn’t take any equity at the time, and we started spending a lot more time on the thing. We eventually decided to pack our bags and move the operation to the Bay Area — startup Mecca.   

It wasn’t long after we arrived in Mountain View that we realized Facebook ads had gotten more expensive. Our advertising arbitrage opportunity was gone. So here we were in Mountain View without a distribution plan. We came up with a couple ideas, and one was good enough to get us into 500 Startups right when we were running on fumes. We celebrated getting into 500 Startups in the Fall of 2012, but after two months in the accelerator I knew we were dead.   

Not having any money wasn’t as much of a sign of failure to me as it should have been. I spent the better part of the year with a couple hundred dollars in my bank account and several thousand more racked up on credit cards. Up until late November 2012 though, I had found a way to scrape together a bit more cash each month to keep going.   

I was pitching a lot of investors on LaunchGram, and I started to find myself agreeing with their conclusions that this business wasn’t either very big or very viable. I had a sick feeling in my stomach every time someone asked me what I did. I started to lie to people at bars or on the train when they asked me what I did. I didn’t want to talk about my startup, because I knew it didn’t make a ton of sense.   

Over Thanksgiving I did a lot of soul searching. Not only was this business not working for a usage standpoint, I didn’t care about the problem. Did the world really need a better infrastructure for product promotion leading up to a launch? Was that something that would actually make the world better? Was it something I actually wanted to be spending my time on?   

No. Looking back, I was lying to myself about being interested in LaunchGram. I came back from Thanksgiving and told my co-founders that we were out of money and the show was over.   

We had poured our hearts and souls into this thing, and it was done now. I held my feelings of failure close to my chest leading up to the conversation, and it came as more of a surprise to Zach and Carrie than it should have.   

-- 

I was pretty lost after this. I didn’t think I was good at anything, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had done some design, I had done some sales, I had done some product management, but I didn’t have enough experience in any of these to land a good job. I wasn’t even trying to find a job for a little while. There was this vacuum in my life; I had nothing to fill the vacuum LaunchGram’s failure had created. I couldn’t come to terms with the idea of not running my own thing anymore. Worst of all, I didn’t have any friends I could relate to with all of this. Carrie, Zach, and I remained friends, but things sucked for a while. I blamed myself for letting them down, and to a degree I still do.  

Along my journey of building LaunchGram, I periodically sent out update emails to people who had helped me out along the way. It was a list of family, friends, investors, and people whose input I valued. When I decided to shut down LaunchGram, I sent an email out to this list. The email reached one of my co-founder’s family members before they had a chance to tell them what had happened. Another screw up - damn. I didn’t even know how to fail.   

Several great things came from that email though. 

About fifteen minutes after I sent that email, an acquaintance named Joël — someone I had only ever met twice — called me. I didn’t even have his phone number. The first thing he said to me was, “Are you okay?” I was both appreciative of the call and confused. My failure was still fresh…but I was still in denial of how hard the next few months would be. I thanked him for the call and assured him I was okay. 

I wasn’t okay. When I saw my friends, I told them things were great — I was finding the next thing!  That, of course, was a big ol' pinocchio lie. I stayed home, played video games, half-heartedly searched for a job, and was trying to teach myself CSS. I needed do build something. There were days I sat in front of my text-editor all day, making progress, feeling strong. The next day I would interview, fail to find anything compelling, and feel hollow.   

A mentor mine named Christian Long also responded to my email. He still lives here in Columbus. He said: 

"As Yoda reminds: "Do or do not. There is no try." But — just as importantly — he only tells Luke, a Jedi in training. That's the key. BE humble now. 

As you are. 

Be passionate. 

As you've elected to be. 

Be willing to trust the way forward. 

Again, as you are." 

“Do or do not. There is no try.” This email meant so much to me. I wasn’t looking for sympathy, and this was not that. It was support; it was encouragement. It helped me realize that failure is something that happens when you set out on adventures. I pictured Luke on Dagobah with Yoda. I knew the path ahead of me wouldn’t be easy, but Christian helped me see that there was a path ahead.   

One night in January of 2013, I had less than $20 to my name. An entrepreneur named Dan Martell had invited me to a dinner with 10+ other founders, and I deluded myself into thinking I belonged there. It was my last hurrah before I packed my shit up and asked my Mom and Dad if I could come back home. I spent $7 on the Caltrain to get to San Francisco from Mountain View. My friend Danielle Morrill happened to be at this dinner. Everyone at dinner was ordering ~$30 dinners (standard fare), but I didn't have $30. I ordered *a* beer and manufactured some self-confidence.   

After dinner, Danielle approached me and asked me if I was all right. I told her that I was great, but she noticed I only ordered a single beer and didn't eat at an event where people were feasting and having a blast. That's usually my queue to have more than a single beer. Danielle called me out, "You're broke aren't you?" 

I'm not sure how you respond to that, but I'm pretty sure I just eloquently said, "ugghghghhghg blarghhhhhhhh yeaaaaaaah I'm broke." I was legitimately planning my quiet escape plan from California. That night, Danielle and Kevin cooked me one of the most meaningful meals of my life: grilled cheese, tomato soup, and a couple cold beers. At the time, I wasn't even comfortable telling my co-founders, Zach and Carrie, how terrified and depressed I was.   

Danielle and Kevin didn't offer me a job that night, but they did loan me some confidence to get back on my feet. Danielle did something pretty great that night. Instead of assuming I’d go get a job at a startup or move home, Danielle asked me what I was going to start next. I thought I was a failure as a founder, but Danielle believed I’d just start something else.   

Before this dinner, I thought I would be calling my Dad the next morning to explain to him how I needed to move back in with them for the first time in five years because I failed and was broke. Instead, I called my Dad the next day and asked him to stake me for two more months in the Bay Area. I told him that I believed that I could figure something out in two months — starting something new, getting a job a startup, anything. My Dad staked me. In twenty four hours, two people I looked up to for mentorship on this crazy ride as a founder chose to take a bet on me.   

About a week later, I was depressed again. Before this time in my life, I used the word “depressed” pretty lightly. Now I think I understand what it means to actually be depressed. I let my friends down, I wasn’t good at anything, I was down on everything. I started crying at silly things. I knew something was wrong and that I needed to get back on my horse, but I didn’t know how. 

I was taking the Caltrain into San Francisco from Mountain View a lot, and for those of you who don’t know, somebody jumps in front of the train at least once a month. I was on the train three months in a row when this happened. The train stops and you’re stuck for an extra thirty minutes to an hour. One time, after the train started to pull away, I was looking out the window and saw the aftermath. I saw the bodybag…only a few yards from the Palo Alto Caltrain station. I already wasn’t having a good day, but I started to wonder who these people were. I wondered if I would be one of those people in a few months if I didn’t get my life figured out. 

I never got past that point. I never seriously considered physically destroying myself, but just thinking about it terrified me. I had to get control over my life.   

See, running my own company, whether it’s going well or not, was like a really good drug, and I was going through withdrawal. There was a void in my life that I just couldn’t fill no matter how hard I tried. It was like someone important in my life had died and I couldn’t bear their absence. Except in this case, the person was part of me. I was nearing the end of my two months, and moving to suburban Philadelphia was looking more and more real every day. 

I started to understand why Joël called me and asked me if I was okay. Over the next month and a half, I got a couple great opportunities, but nothing really spoke to me. I felt like I’d be making the same mistake I made when I started a company and didn’t care about the problem. One thing was for sure — being on Dagobah sucked.   

Then one morning, Danielle texted me saying she’d like to “buy my company.” I didn’t know what that really meant, but I drove up to San Francisco immediately to get coffee with her. We talked about how LaunchGram and Referly could be a good fit together, but I knew that Danielle was losing faith in Referly. We talked about other startup ideas, and she offered me a sum of money to come join her and Kevin. What I would do wasn’t clear, but I knew that I respected these people, and working with them could not be bad. I took the deal. 

Two weeks later, Danielle and Kevin decided to let everyone go at Referly, but they asked me to stay to help create the next thing. Danielle had raised $1.2M for Referly, and we had about half of that left…to do basically whatever we wanted. While Danielle wasn’t “closing the company down,” she was giving up a product she had worked tirelessly on for more than a year. I saw her going through the same things I had gone through, just on a four-month delayed schedule.   

We didn’t know what we were doing for a while, and figuring out what to do is a different story. Through the early days of what would become Mattermark, I still felt like shit. Sometimes I wondered whether I was a washed up entrepreneur screwing around with two other washed up entrepreneurs. Maybe that was true, but as we settled on something interesting to work on, I started to feel a whole lot better. 

Getting above “pre-LaunchGram parity,” though took me almost two years, but I did get back on my feet. I got more than back on my feet. Whether I “beat depression” or just plain got back on my horse, I ended up humbled and unafraid. Tim Ferriss said, "If we let the storms pass and choose to reflect, we come out better than ever.” It echoes Asimov’s, "Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests.”   

People will tell you that failure is a risk you take when you set out on an adventure, but what they don’t tell you is that failure can be a gift. It is a rewarding experience despite how painful it can be.   

About a year later, when I got an email from a founder that looked a lot like the one I sent when I closed my company down, I understood. I gave him a call just like Joël had called me. I got his voicemail, so instead I opted to send him an email.   

I said, "As Yoda reminds: "Do or do not. There is no try." But — just as importantly — he only tells Luke, a Jedi in training. That's the key."

[realandysparks]

Five Mind Decision Making

Early in life, my Dad taught me the value of surrounding myself with really smart people. Friends and mentors along the way have echoed my Dad, advising me to build a "personal board of advisors."Personally, I call these people the "five mind," and they're incredibly useful when a big decision rolls around.

It isn't always exactly five people, but it's definitely catchier than "personal board of advisors." The people I choose to include in the five mind change based on each decision (if I was thinking about getting engaged, I would call different people than if I needed bail). Members of each decision's five mind need to satisfy four criteria: (1) I respect the hell out of them, (2) they have enough context to have a strong opinion, (3) I know they will be honest, and (4) they have relevant experience. 

We recently made a pretty big decision not to build something at Mattermark. This initiative would have fully absorbed my time, and it would have changed our company in a significant way. 

At first, I was excited as hell. "This is going to be fun," I thought. As I let the thought marinate, I started to see how this was going to mean big changes for how I spent my time, and I knew it was time for a five mind decision. 

I called my Dad, who is not just my Dad, but a trusted mentor and friend. He was just as excited as I was. This made me nervous, because my Dad almost never thinks my ideas are good right off the bat. He usually provides much needed critical feedback that I hate at first, but value extensively in the long-term. 

I arranged a breakfast, a coffee, and a couple drinks with this decision's five mind. My second meeting was just as excited, if not more excited, as my Dad and I. This is when I knew something was wrong. Finally, on meeting number three, I got the critical feedback I needed. I got about five reasons why we were about to make a big mistake along with a whole lot of clarity. After that meeting, I walked along the San Francisco waterfront back to my office while listening to Ratatat's "Loud Pipes." In my head I pit point against counterpoint, and by the time I got back to the office I knew the initiative, in its current form, was dead. I was a little bummed out, but my head was clear.

That afternoon my Co-Founder, Danielle, and I had a meeting about this new thing. I sat down, knowing I would be crushing her imagination in this meeting. She sat down and insisted on speaking first. She surprised me by having come to the same conclusion as me on her own. She came to the meeting equally nervous about crushing my imagination.  

This is just the most recent of countless stories from my life where the five mind helped me objectively evaluate a big decision and course correct. Now let's just hope they're right.

[realandysparks]

Shutting Down the Editors

Never have I ever mastered the art of publishing on a regular basis. The only time I published new blog posts once a week was when I was writing about shutting down my last company. Let's just say I had a lot of free time to wonder what bombs my past self had unwittingly dropped on my future self. I think there are a lot of hard things about writing. Some of these things have completely kept me from publishing. I hate this because I'm hyper-aware of the lizard brain that keeps me from pushing "Post." 

Somewhere along the way, I let what other people think get in the way. I decided doing things "right" was for who-knows-why was important. I scrutinized each post for perfect grammar, the right voices, proper tense, comma usage that made sense to my reader. Trying to anticipate my audience's reaction became like a virus that shut down my ability to share. 

I'm not even sure what I was looking for when I asked for pre-posting feedback on my writing. I think I hoped that by showing it to a few people early, they would help me appeal to more people. I've decided that my goal isn't to get a large number of people to read my posts, but rather to put my thoughts out there for a large number of people to discover should it be interesting.

Writing is most fun for me when I just let it flow. It’s all the going back and taking feedback and changing things to be how someone else things they should be that shuts me down. So for now, I’m shutting down the editors, and I’ll be publishing a whole lot more.

[realandysparks]

Use One Computer to Chromecast Different Windows to Multiple TVs

A few months ago, we moved Mattermark into a shiny new office. Today, I was using the quiet time before the new year to setup some TVs we mounted in order to display different teams' metrics. I wanted to do a wireless solution, so I bought three Chromecasts (one for each TV). I plugged them in, got them setup, and then was horrified when it seemed as though I had to get three different computers to control the three Chromecasts. If you Google around, you won't find a solution, but I found a way to cast different browser windows to multiple TVs from one computer. Here's how you do it:

Go to your settings in Chrome

Add a new user for each different TV you want to cast to (screenshot)

Install the Chromecast Extension for each of those browser windows

Click the Chromecast Icon in the top right corner of Chrome and cast your browser to a different Chromecast for each different screen you want to display

You're all set!

[realandysparks]

Don’t Let Fear Keep You From Moving

“Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” - Horace Greely, 1865*

College graduation season has arrived, meaning a lot of grads will decide to stay or go, but many will let fear prevent them from relocating to chase their dreams in a new city.

One year ago, I arrived in San Francisco with everything I owned in my car. I left Columbus, Ohio to plant my startup in more fertile ground. The last call I got before crossing the Ohio-Indiana border was from a local investor. He heard I was heading west, was calling to change my mind, and wanted us to be the first deal in a new fund. It all sounded rather uncertain, and I determined to be a distraction. I told him my mind was made up. I hung up the phone, cranked up “Born to Be Wild,” rolled the window down, hit the gas, and watched Ohio disappear.

Since then, I’ve lost touch with a good number of people, but fortunately new cities hold new people, Google invented Hangouts, and beers taste just as good over the phone as they do over a table. My company, LaunchGram, didn’t quite work out, but now I’m working on something I love a whole lot more. All of my pre-moving anxiety was silly, and chances are so is yours.

After graduating I almost moved to the Bay Area, but couldn’t pull the trigger. With a girlfriend I loved, friends I cherished, and a job that paid well, the thought of leaving all that behind felt selfish and intimidating. Instead I stayed put, but each month the gravity of San Francisco grew stronger.

Late one night at a bar, a friend of mine put it to me straight and said, “Which do you think you’re more likely to regret in twenty years? Choosing to move to the Bay Area or choosing to stay here?” The answer was clear.

One of my favorite professors, Artie Isaac, said that every person wants three things: the job, the city, and the significant other. Everyone can easily get one of the three, getting two out of three is difficult, and managing to pull off all three is undeniably lucky. After hearing this, my uncle said, “Pick the perfect city; the job and the girl will be waiting for you there.” My decision was made. I put in my two weeks notice, threw a going away party (okay, two), and said goodbye to a lot of people I love.

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac nails it: “I was surprised, as always, at how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” Jack was right. Getting worked up over the prospect of moving and all that goes with it is easier, but after committing, liberation and possibility take over.

* Whether Horace Greely was the first to use the phrase “Go West, young man” is disputed, as are the details of the rest of the quote. For further background, read more on Wikipedia.

[realandysparks]

I Told You So, Dad (on Tesla)

A long time ago, my Dad asked me to keep him in the loop when I determined a technology stock to be "hot." I have only ever recommended he buy four stocks: Apple (in 2006), Google (in 2006), Facebook (at IPO), and most recently, Tesla (Sept. 2012). Go figure, the only one he actually invested in was Facebook, and we know how that's going.

So today I sent him this: 

Does that make me an obnoxious son? Absolutely. 

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part IV: Recovery

Part I  Part II  Part III

Once I realized the jig was up, it was time to tell my team, pick up the pieces, and figure out what else I was going to do with my life now that LaunchGram was over.

Telling my team was no small task. In fact, I think it was the scariest part of the whole thing. I was afraid I’d lose my friends. Not only did I want to prevent that from happening, I wanted to make sure create the best outcome possible for everybody. It was my responsibility to make the transition out as smooth as possible.

Closing down a company is a lot like a breakup. Sometimes the circumstances dictate that you can be friends, other times they don’t. I remember getting lunch with my mentor, Christian, a month or so ago when I was in the thick of this decision. He told me, “When the nights get hard, double down on the people in your life.” So that’s what I did. I doubled down and focused on turning my co-founders back into friends.

I wanted to wait until after New Years’ Eve so everybody could enjoy their holiday, but after who knows how many glasses of champagne, vodka and whatevers, and a few PBRs, the emotional side of me came out and spilled some of my conclusion with my co-founders. I could have handled that better. I took each of them on a walk the next day to talk about next steps. Everybody knew it was coming to a degree, and there was an odd sense of peace mixed with turbulence in the air that’s hard to describe. We were simultaneously afraid, but confident we’d figure things out. Throughout the whole process, I had a number of off-the-charts incredible mentors, advisors, and friends who helped me through the process. Despite feeling awfully alone at times, I was tremendously lucky to be surrounded by support. Each individual had a [very] different opinion on what to do, but at the end of the day it was up to me to make the call (see: Feedback Fatigue). After the decision was final and I slowly filled each of these people in, a couple even offered temporary employment as a bridge to help us figure out what sort of future we intended to build. To those of you - you know who you are - thank you. When a dam breaks, the village below does not simply stand up and rebuild. It takes time, and the village is really never the same afterward; some things are broken. Similarly, when you lose a battle, you come out on the other side changed. There’s a tendency to come out with a higher aversion towards risk and there’s a high likelihood you’ll feel lost. I sure did. But I also came out stronger and smarter - able to read the battlefield and see things coming before they hit. That said, I questioned what my role in the business world was: was I a product guy, a marketing guy, a sales guy, or something else? For so long, I had identified with being a founder who wore many hats, some of which fit better than others. Then I remembered the beauty of The Avett Brothers’ line, “Decide what to be and go be it.”

The beauty is that you don’t get to decide what to be just once. You have to repeatedly revisit the act of deciding what to be over and over again. If you’re really going to do what you love, you have to be vigilant in making sure you know what you love doing each day. I saw a TEDx talk in Washington D.C. a few years back that talked about this idea. The speaker called it, “prototyping your life,” as a way of figuring out what you’d like to be so you can get on with being that. In his recent NYT bestseller, The Social Animal (which I HIGHLY recommend), David Brooks said,

“the truth is life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one.”

Losing the battle with LaunchGram was a “regulated error.” I’ve emerged battle-hardened, entirely more mature and significantly humbled, but not knocked down. What I really learned is that life isn’t about fighting one battle. It isn’t about throwing one big hail mary pass. It’s about a series of focused and purposeful battles.  It’s about knowing each battle is part of a larger war to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. “Deciding what to be,” “doing what you love and doing it more often,” and “enjoying your work,” are all things worth fighting for, but fighting is hard. It’s emotionally draining, and it’s even painful at times. But it’s possible. You just have to fight. And people only win battles when they’re fighting for what they love. So fight the battles, because the war is waging, and it’s one worth fighting for. It’s a war for a better future and after all, the future is ours.

Thanks so much to Danielle Morrill, Nick Seguin, Jarrett Klingbeil, and my Mom for reading drafts of this post.

#Andy Sparks #500 startups #Failed Startup #LaunchGram

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part III: Panic

Part I   Part II

Around Thanksgiving I panicked, and I don’t panic often. I decided to spill my guts to my Dad, who I’m lucky enough to be able to count as both a mentor and a friend. He helped me realize I had two options: close it down, or double down and give it another shot. I convinced myself afterwards that I was just hallucinating, I would go back and set some goals for numbers, and we’d figure this thing out. 

But as I said in my last post, doubt is the disease of the determined, and now it had infiltrated my confidence on too deep of a level. I expressed my concern to a mentor, and was advised to bury it, put it back behind the dam, or at least to make sure my co-founders didn’t smell my fear. Keep it to yourself lest the disease shall spread, I was advised, at least until I was sure. Loneliness doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling. My two best friends, the people I needed the most, were the ones I couldn’t talk to. It was somewhere around this time that a good friend from my past sent me a message saying that he had quit his job that he hated, found one he loved, and finally felt confident to talk to me again. I was completely perplexed. This was a guy I’d pick up the phone for at 4am, despite having not seen in a couple years, and he was telling me that “since I was doing what I loved, he felt embarrassed.” It was life’s ultimate ironic sucker punch because I was going through mental and physical agony. Sleep was basically a cruel joke I taunted myself with by telling myself I was in control of it. I kept up appearances and told everyone I was fine. If men don’t cry, CEOs definitely don’t. At one point, I would even go into my room and turn off the lights after a certain point in the night just to convince my co-founders I wasn’t an insomniac who was about to break down. One day before Christmas, I decided to take a step back from the whole picture. I asked myself, “If you could be doing anything, regardless of money or time, would it be this?” I had asked myself this question before, but then the answer was no on both counts, and I really panicked. All of a sudden, every single doubt, every single tiny inclination towards this being the wrong battle to be in just rushed in. It felt like I was getting waterboarded by negativity, fear, and self-doubt. The dam just utterly collapsed. I wanted to cry, but out of some stupid BS macho ego mindset, I just couldn’t. I felt empty, exhausted, and isolated. I tried to make sense of it all. I tried to pick up the pieces and see if I could salvage the company, the product, and the team. Not only did all doubt permeate my every thought, all the people I would let down rushed crippled me from making decisions and having important conversations. Previously this fear of letting down my peers, parents, mentors, advisors, investors, and friends were hidden behind the dam under the pretense that I was going to succeed and damn anybody who said otherwise. I realized that I had investors. I had co-founders who were best friends who I’d be letting down. I had put my life-savings into this company. That was supposed to be a down payment on a house. My friends moved across the country for this. I sacrificed some really great relationships for this. My Mom and Dad told their friends and my Grandparents I was successful - some “whiz-kid” in Silicon Valley - and somehow managed to become independent despite a generation plagued with a lack of direction. But really, I just felt like a fraud. “What to do if you think your company is failing or going to fail,” is not a class Ohio State offered in their Entrepreneurship minor, so I sucked it up. I woke up the next morning, made coffee, and tried to hold it together. Part IV: Recovery will be published tomorrow.

#Andy Sparks #LaunchGram #500 Startups #Failed Startup

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part II: Distraction

Part I

Distraction is the enemy of progress and ambition. It happens when we take our eyes off the prize and start letting other people’s goals dictate our own. Distraction happens too often and it happens because we let it. When I look back at LaunchGram and why I failed my team, my investors, and myself, I see a story with distraction at its source.

The honest truth is that I started LaunchGram not because I cared about movies, tv shows and video games coming out in the near future, but because a mentor threw out some statistics that lead me to believe that it could be a lucrative opportunity. I looked into the data on what was then a Facebook ad arbitrage system and it looked like we could print money. 

Our Facebook ad arbitrage system got “Zucker-punched” when Facebook’s ad price increased. We should have seen this coming, but the fact is that we didn’t. It happened right when I had convinced my team to pack their bags and move from Ohio to Silicon Valley. We were in too deep to quit, so we had to find a way forward. We hunkered down on building an alerts mechanism for video games, movies, and tv shows that aren’t out yet. We encountered competition. We hustled down relationships with phenomenal advisors, mentors, and now friends. We got our first investor with 500 Startups. I started and built LaunchGram because I thought it was a lucrative opportunity - not because I deeply cared about the problem - and that started to become a problem. When you’re an entrepreneur, you hear a massive amount of “no,” “that’s stupid,” “that will never work,” “you’re out of your mind,” “you’ll fail,” and other warnings reeking of risk-aversion. As a self-defence mechanism, you start to build a dam. You put all the things that make you afraid behind this dam because there is no other way to keep your enthusiasm. Doubt is the disease of the determined, so you dam it up. That dam only works if you care about the problem you’re solving and believe you’re going to solve it. Right around Thanksgiving, three investors told me that they liked me, but they just couldn’t invest in this idea. That was when I realized it was because I wasn’t emotionally invested in the idea. I was not fully engaged. I was distracted and they could see right through my manufactured confidence. So the dam started to break. Part III: Panic will be published tomorrow.

#Andy Sparks #LaunchGram #Distraction #Failed Startup #500 Startups

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War -- Part I

Ever since I was in the fourth grade I’ve been waging war. This war is about not settling for working in a coffee shop or a cubicle when you know you’re capable of more. 

In Mrs. McKenzie’s fourth grade class, she asked us all to go home and ask our Dads what they would be if they could go back in time and do it again. It was an exercise for Father’s Day. I remember my Dad somberly admitted without hesitation that he’d go back and become a baseball pitcher. Instead, he did ops for a dot com.

That was the first time I can remember feeling incredible sympathy towards my Dad. If I had the words I have now, I think I would have said to him, “Damn. That is some real shit, Dad. Why didn’t you, then?” Right then and there, I was determined to have my answer to my son be, “I wouldn’t change a thing. Not a damned thing.” Looking back, that poignant conversation with my Dad and the realization that I might live my whole life doing the wrong thing, has been motivating me to fight this war for the last fourteen years. It turns out I’m not alone. This war is about a call to action like The Avett Brothers’ “Decide what to be and go be it,” and it’s about Holstee’s manifesto proclamation, “This is your life. Do what you love and do it often.” It’s about what a Reddit thread called, The New American Dream: “Doing what you love and trying to find a way to get paid doing it.” It’s about not settling for working in a coffee shop or a cubicle when you know you’re capable of more. Our war isn’t just a naive “no regrets,” battle-cry. Rather it is a generational and cultural shift away from realistic retirement plans and stable careers towards an environment rife with chaos. Flexibility is compulsory, manic economic conditions appear to be the rule rather than the exception, and education is not something that happens to you, it’s something you’re responsible for individually. In war, the eventual victor doesn’t necessarily win all of the battles. I fought two battles since graduating college and lost them both pretty miserably. The first of which was working for a mobile software startup in Columbus, Ohio (I went to Ohio State) while believing I could run the place. The second battle I lost was technically my second incorporated company (my first was a microbrewery at 19 and you can guess how that fared). I lost the second battle this month. Not only did I lose it, I retreated. I surveyed the battlefield, considered my odds, and decided to live to fight another day. Writing that makes it sound like there was some kind of glory in it. There wasn’t. It’s a metaphor that not only makes me feel better about doing something hard and failing at it, it helps me understand this failure in the larger context of the war. In October, we managed to hustle LaunchGram into 500 Startups. I started a weekly blog series to cover what the experience was like but I ended up stopping the series. It was a time suck and transparency is easy when things are going well, but doesn’t always make sense when things aren’t. Somewhere in that series, I got a few tweets and emails asking for stories about the hard times and the worst times, because a lot of blog posts are about the good times and the best times. So, with that, I’ve decided to write a series while my latest failure is fresh. I’ll publish three more posts in this series to cover (1) why it happened, (2) how it felt while it was happening, and (3) how I picked up the pieces and came out stronger.   It’s a story I haven’t taken lightly. When I set out to write it, I was doing it to share the experience with other founders & aspiring founders. After finishing it though, it has been deeply important in helping me understand the role of failure. So with that, this story is a bit self-serving, but I also truly believe it has the potential to be helpful to others. Part II: Distraction will be published tomorrow.

Thanks so much to Danielle Morrill, Nick Seguin, Jarrett Klingbeil, and my Mom for reading drafts of this post. 

#Andy Sparks #Failed Startup #LaunchGram #500 startups

[realandysparks]

Closing Down LaunchGram

There are certain things in life you absolutely dread doing, but the longer you put them off the more painful they get. This is one of those things. Right after the first of the year, the team at LaunchGram made the final decision to close up shop. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. For the short-term, the website will stay up, and we’ll be sure to let all of you know if that changes. This post is decidedly and purposefully brief. On Monday, I’ll publish the first post in a four-part series, concluding on Thursday, explaining what happened, why we came to this decision, and how it felt going through it. I didn’t sit down to write the series because I think anybody cares about what I have to say, but rather because I needed to work through the experience in words and because I hope that others can learn from what we’ve gone through. This will be redundant, but I’d like to thank everybody from family, to friends, to advisors, to mentors, and to those of you that transcend those classifications for your support and advice throughout the process. One thing I am sure of moving forward, is that whatever happens next is going to be one hell of a lot more exciting than what happened before. So with that, I say I’d like to say a bittersweet farewell to LaunchGram, and welcome a new chapter of incredible possibilities and adventures.

-Andy

[realandysparks]

Week 9: Opening Up to “More Open, Smart, and Honest Criticism”

This post is the sixth in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.”  Andy is currently the CEO at LaunchGram.

I just read Semil Shah's blog post on how the startup community needs "More Open, Smart, and Honest Criticism." It really resonated with me.

We get a lot of this at 500 Startups from mentors, advisors, friends, and just about anybody, but I also know there's a lot we don't get. Just the other day I had a friend tell me that he wasn't sure why he'd ever use LaunchGram. We've known each other for a few months, and it kind of bummed me out that he hadn't felt comfortable enough to tell me this before, but I was grateful he had decided to come forward.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to open up LaunchGram to respectful, but open, smart, and honest criticism. Conversations between friends happen behind our backs (I'm 100% fine with this) and this is a great opportunity for people to let it loose.

CAVEAT: It's easy to say, "That's a dumb useless app," but it's hard to say, "here's why, here's where I think the team could drive value if they moved in a slightly different direction, and here's how I'd be willing to help them if they did ___."

Please either leave your criticism and feedback in the comments below, on Hacker News, or shoot me an email at [email protected]. I'm looking forward to it.

[realandysparks]

Week 5: Always Be Opening

This post is the fifth in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.”  Andy is currently the CEO at LaunchGram. In the 1992 film, Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin delivered an absolutely epic sales speech. The speech leaves viewers unable to forget Baldwin’s point: “Always be closing!” But it isn’t just about closing. In order to close, you first have to open. Good salespeople know that they always have to keep their ‘pipeline’ or ‘funnel’ full. A pipeline works by filling the top with as many people as possible, and then filtering them down to buyers. Adding people to the top is called ‘opening,’ and getting sales is called ‘closing.’ This isn’t just about sales though. When you’re starting a company, you need all kinds of funnels.   You need funnels of potential co-founders, investors, customers, and hires. They don’t all come at once, so you have to grind. This is what it means to build a network. As a CEO, “non-technical” founder, or businessperson, your technical skill is knowing a boatload of people. A lot of the skills you need for each funnel overlap, but I’ve added a few notes and comments I think are important for each type below:

Co-Founders

This is the earliest place entrepreneurs fail. They either don’t have developers, designers, and business development people in their back pocket to call on, or they have the wrong ones and things go all kinds of terrible.

Something I think business people forget a lot is that developers and designers make great friends, and great friends can turn into great co-founders, too.

Investors

The mistake I see the most with first time entrepreneurs, and one I’ve personally made, is waiting until they’re strapped for cash to start talking to investors. Mark Suster talks about how he invests in lines, not dots. The TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) is that investors don’t like to write a check after one meeting. They like to get to know you and see how you perform over time. That gives them the ability to make a more informed decision on how you’ll perform in the future.

In a recent book called, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter, author Meg Jay calls this building “Identity Capital.” She describes it as, “the currency we use to metaphorically purchase jobs and relationships and other things we want.” In this case, every entrepreneur needs to be building “Identity Capital” with investors they’d like to get checks from well before they ask for them.

Customers

Customers are a lot like investors. You need to talk to as many of them as possible, as early as possible. Even if you aren’t ready to sell them something, get to know decision makers in your industry, gain their trust, and drink a beer with them. It’s the least you can do.

Another great point from Jay’s book is about what she calls “weak ties.” The gist is: “as we look for jobs or relationships or opportunities of any kind, it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative.”

It might not be immediately apparent to you why you should know advertising executives in New York City, the CTO of a large medical software company, or a CMO you ran into at a conference. Some time down the road, however, you might look back and wish you knew someone in some space. Avoid this; minimize your risk by building an extensive network early.

Hires

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself looking to hire additional employees, you’re going to need a large pool of talent to draw from. If you’re starting a web-based business, how  many developers do you know that code in the language your product is built in? How many A-level sales guys in from your industry do you know? How many graphic and interaction designers do you source feedback on your product from?

Creating a company can be all-consuming, and it’s easy to find yourself buried and not socializing. Getting out and meeting people from different backgrounds and varied skill sets is vital to your ability to grow your team. Build out a diverse network of talented people, so when you need to hire, you can.  

The ability to close is essential to professional growth; there’s no arguing that. But you need to make sure the co-founders you bring on, the investors you get into bed with, the customers you tie yourself to, and the employees you bring on to build with you are worth the effort. The only way to do that is to meet and get to know scores of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. The only way to do that is to always be opening.

My buddy, Jason Evanish, recently wrote a blog post on “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter” that took off on Hacker News. Read it here. As for hiring, Mark Suster has several great posts I highly recommend here.

[realandysparks]

Week 4: Fear of Failure Prevents Minimal, but Necessary Time Off

This post is the fourth in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.”  Andy is currently the CEO at LaunchGram. When I sit down to write a blog post, I usually write down five or ten titles and then run with what strikes me. Today, I ended up with two conflicting titles: “Personal Life, What’s That?” and “Why Weekends are Important.” Contradictory titles? Yes. Accurate? Also yes. How is that possible? Well, there’s an unspoken tension in early-stage startup land I’d like to talk about. The first half of this tension comes from the fact that we’re all terrified that if we don’t work hard enough, our companies will die. I actually just saw a tweet from Chris Dumler today agreeing with something Sarah Lacy from PandoDaily recently said: “I wake up excited and terrified every day." The other half of the tension comes from our very real and human need to turn off and relax. I’m not talking “go on a three week vacation” kind of relaxing, though. I’m talking about the “take a weekend for yourself” kind of relaxing. But we’re afraid to take a weekend for ourselves. I know I personally feel guilty on Sunday nights after I spent my Saturday with friends and my Sunday with a good book. We’re afraid because if we fail, it will be because we weren’t working on that weekend and we’ll blame ourselves forever. So we end up working a good amount of weekends. What if the opposite is true, though?   Relaxing is valuable. People come up with ideas in the shower because our brains need to turn off to process life.  What if our unwillingness to take time to reflect, relax a bit, and take a step back from our company leads us to failure? This is a back and forth issue. Some people think entrepreneurs don’t work hard enough, some people think they work too hard. Should we sacrifice our personal lives, and if so, for how long? Finding a balance is obviously up to each entrepreneur. I’d love to hear from others, from all stages, in the comments section below. Discuss below using the DISQUS comments, or comment on Hacker News here. Also relative to this article: People Claiming to Work More Than 70 Hours a Week Are Totally Lying, Probably

[realandysparks]

Week 3: Feedback Fatigue

This post is the third in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.”  Andy is currently the CEO at LaunchGram. I ask all of our users and everybody I meet for feedback. Having started 500 Startups three weeks ago, I’ve been talking to brilliant past and present founders about our product. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback. Design feedback, UX feedback, business model feedback, marketing strategy feedback, you name it, I’ve been getting it lately. A lot of it has been from really smart people that I look up to. A lot of it has been insightful, well thought out feedback. A lot of it has been really terrible feedback that is uninformed. As CEO, it is my job to swallow my pride and defer to users and experts’ insights, but it is also to trust my gut, defy the experts, and press on. This can lead to feedback fatigue, which is when you feel that feedback stops being useful and becomes a distraction. But feedback fatigue is good; it means you’re getting a healthy amount of feedback. The key is that while you don’t have to take everybody’s advice, you do need to listen to as much of it as possible.

This will be exhausting and it will be obnoxious, but it will also be one of the most beneficial things you do for the growth of your product and business.

Discuss below using the DISQUS comments, or comment on Hacker News here.

[realandysparks]

Week 2: CEOs: Will you crack? Or will you conquer?

This post is the second in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.”  Andy is currently the CEO at LaunchGram. This week at 500 Startups got me thinking a lot about what it means to be a CEO. I’ve spent the last day writing something like six or seven pages worth of thoughts. Almost all of them were pure crap, so I’m keeping this short. Yishan Wong, the CEO at Reddit, did a fireside chat at the 500 Startups office this week. A general consensus came about amongst all of us in the CEO role during the conversation that: “as CEO, you basically always feel bad.” This is because there is always something going wrong in the CEO’s mind. We know what could be done better, and we know what our weaknesses are. It is scary. It is obnoxious. But you have to make a choice. Are you going to let the pain and stress get to you? Are you going to be a loose cannon and take things out on your co-founders and employees? Or are you going to learn how to manage your psychology and be the leader your team needs you to be? As CEO, you are going to be terrified a lot and you are going to be pissed off a lot. Good. That means you care. The fundamental choice though, is how you channel your fear and frustration. Will you be paralyzed by fear, or will you learn to find the crown of self-control called calmness? Will you be pissed off for pity, looking for someone or something to blame? Or will you you be pissed off for greatness? Will you crack? Or will you conquer? I hope you choose the latter. Thanks to Jarrett Klingbeil for editing drafts of this post.

[realandysparks]

Week 1: Get Better

This post is the first in a series titled “The Chronicles of 500: Weekly Essays on What I Learned from 500 Startups.” 

Join the discussion on Hacker News here.

Last week, I wrote about the path that led my team at LaunchGram to our new home at 500 Startups and this week I’m pumped to kick off a new series of essays that detail what I’ve learned from my experience at 500.

Quick Introduction

Our first week diving into 500 Startups was a bit short, as it officially kicked off on Thursday, October 4th. There was no shortage of knowledge to be gained. This week’s takeaways are as follows:

500 Startups facilitates opportunities, but is not a solution to your problems,

500 Startups is a Family

Immediately after joining 500 Startups, fundraising is your full-time job.

500 as a facilitator of opportunity, but not a solution to problems

Our first week at 500 Startups reminded me of an episode of Mad Men where Don tells Peggy, “You’re good. Get better. Stop asking for things.” 

Dave, Paul, Christine, and the entire 500 team kept reminding us that we were good enough to make it into 500, but that ~80% of us would be “fucking dead” within one year. If we want to survive, we need to get better pronto, and that’s on each company individually. 

Our survival, and ultimately our success or failure, will depend on each team’s ability to learn from the functional expertise of our batchmates, mentors, and previous 500 founders. The difference between Don and Dave is that not only is asking for things okay, it is encouraged. “Your problems are not unique,” is a phrase that’s been echoing around in my head all week. Dave would support Don’s overarching point: stop asking for permission from others, focus on your work, and just get shit done.

While getting into 500 feels like a pretty big accomplishment, the team there made it clear that a long road lies ahead and while they can help us, they are by no means a “silver bullet.”

500 Startups is a Family

The first thing that really struck me was how disarming the atmosphere of 500 Startups was. Prior to this, going to 500’s office was a relatively stressful experience given that we were pitching to be part of the program. It’s amazing how fast the energy in the 12th floor of 444 Castro changes when Dave McClure is bouncing up and down on a silver exercise ball with a shit-eating grin. The occasional mentor filtering in to give advice with a bottle of DeWars helps, too.

Something families are great about is staying in touch, so naturally, if 500 is to be one grand family, internal communication is going to be pretty important. Lucky for us, Paul Singh has created a completely internal tool called “Dashboard,” that makes it ridiculously easy to interact with their network of 190+ mentors and countless past founders. Immediately after signing paper, multiple invitations to Google Groups and 500 founders-only resources went out. Internal communication tools are great, but only if people use them, and somehow the 500 team has made this happen.

In short, 500 Startups has successfully made it easy to feel like we’re part of an epic family which cares about each of its members from very early on, and that’s powerful.

Immediately after joining 500 Startups, fundraising is your full-time job

It’s easy to get excited about a fresh infusion of $50k because at first that number sounds huge, but when you budget it out and you only have a few months suddenly you’re losing sleep. Losing sleep is something that’s mentioned a lot in the valley and in startup blogs all across the web, but when you actually can’t sleep because you’re worried you won’t be able to pay your friends you convinced to move across the country to work on a company, shit gets real fast. 

Getting into 500 Startups certainly doesn’t make fundraising harder. On day two, Paul Singh and George Kellerman dropped some serious knowledge about fundraising. Here are a few gems I picked up on:

You have 2-3 minutes to pitch your traction, problem, and solution. If they can’t understand what you do in that 2-3 minutes, they won’t understand you in 8, 10, 15 or 30.

After your 2-3 minute pitch, shut the hell up; the next person to talk loses.

Entrepreneurs think in terms of how much money they’re getting, but sometimes investors think in terms of what % of the company they’re buying (this varies from angel to angel / with VCs, but is good to be conscious of)

Finally, you can’t go very long in Silicon Valley without hearing the phrase “fundraising is a full-time job.” It’s tough to give up some control over the product, but by this point I know I’ve built a team that can more than handle it on their own. Know that your people deserve big paychecks, so go get out there are bring them home.

Conclusion

After our first week at 500 Startups, I’ve realized it’s on me to make things happen for LaunchGram. I’ve known this all along, but having it shoved in your face again never hurts. The 500 family can and will help; resources are on the table. The opportunities are right in front of me. The question is, will I take advantage of them? Will I leverage the brand? Will my company succeed? Will LaunchGram get better? You bet your ass it will, because we’re going to leverage every single opportunity and every single second to build the best damned company we can.

Join the discussion on Hacker News here.

Huge thanks to Danielle Morrill, Zach Boerger, and Christine Tsai for editing this post.

PS - I’d also like to give a quick shout out to Blake Masters, as this series is inspired by his posts on Peter Thiel’s CS:183: Startup class.