The river is your trail
2024-09-06
Newsletter #4
Reflection
I took a couple of days off last week to go to Zion national park with my wife. In 2013, I had backpacked through the Zion narrows and thought it was the most indescribably unique experience and always wanted to go back. This time my wife accompanied me. She is not a fan of overnight stays, so we decided to do a - difficult - through hike of the narrows, which in theory is 18 miles long (reality with traverses was longer)
To pick up a permit, a consult with a ranger is required to warn us of the difficulty and dangers - rescues are very difficult (no space for a chopper to land since it is a very narrow slot canyon, and carrying someone is very difficult. The ranger also warned. us not to try to go around the river and avoid the water because 'the river is your trail'. Stay in the water the entire time.
We finished the trip - totaling 23 brutal miles - in about 9hours 45 min. The line the ranger shared stayed with me the entire trip. I spent a lot of time thinking about the statement.
Startups are never a straight line. There are pitfalls, unexpected discoveries, and dead ends. Much like our hike was. We had to cross waterfalls (never plunge through, find a way round), rockfalls (figure out how to scramble through them) and unexpected surprises (water is too deep, you have to swim). As you discover more about domains, you find new ideas, discover new ways of solving it.
But some central tenets should never change. Find a big problem. Be true to putting the customers at the center. That is your river, your trail, and you have to stay true to it.
Progress
I am seriously happy to have a co-founder start with me this month. It has been a pretty lonely couple of months, and having a high caliber leader and thinker to work full time with me has me all excited. More about him in the next newsletter.
I mentioned that I have slowed down on the customer discovery, though it is still ongoing: I am now determining the tech stack. Given that there will be a bunch of AI work, use of python is a no-brainer: I have been playing with FastAPI and am quite delighted with it. We are likely to do much of the backend work using it. I am also building the front end using nextjs, and railway.app for delightful deployments. I have been offered AWS credits.. but for the first time in the past decade, I passed on it. I do not see us using AWS (directly)
Learning The past two weeks have had quite a few inbounds with investors. I have not really done much reaching out to investors, because fundraising was not a priority at this point. But I am realizing now with a clear identification of a huge problem, we have to accelerate into a product launch. We will get only so far with just me, and soon the two of us. Stay tuned as I work through the fundraising process.
The interesting part of fundraising is the spectrum of advice I have received about it. From 'Never raise money' and 'Don't have investors breathing down your neck early' to 'Raise when you can, you never know when the market will dry up'. These are all correct in their own way - you have to find your own path. The best advice I got in the past couple of weeks was from Mike Grossman, who was the CEO of Inflection.com and my manager and now my mentor. His advice was never to over-correct to advice and feedback, and find your own path. Paul Buccheit has one of my favorite statements on this:
Advice = Inadequate life experiences + over-generalization.
The journey of building a startup is about embracing the path—however winding and unpredictable it may be. The river is our trail, and the obstacles are part of the adventure. As I look ahead, I’m excited to continue navigating these waters with a renewed sense of purpose and a co-founder to lean on.