Building a Startup

My partner Nick blogged about this Kickstarter project yesterday and I immediately backed it.

Second Chance Studio is a nonprofit digital media company that trains and employs formerly incarcerated individuals.

You can back their Kickstarter project here.

I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.”

I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work.

An example of “run right away” would be to raise a $30mm seed round, hire a couple of hundred employees, and go for broke. That mostly results in being broke.

Of course, there are examples of founders who did that and succeeded. But they would be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Crawl, walk, run generally means start small, do one thing really well, then get a little bigger, do a few things really well, then get a little bigger and do a few more things really well.

Crawl, walk, run is more resilient. It allows for mistakes that aren’t fatal. It takes a bit longer to get to the finish line this way, but the probability of success is way higher with crawl, walk, run.

Crawl, walk, run is a mantra for doing a startup and I recommend it to everyone.

I’m sitting outside of my favorite coffee shop sipping on a coffee and writing. I do this many mornings.

When I walked into the coffee shop this morning I was wearing a mask:

I counted all of the people in the shop waiting in line (six feet apart) and waiting for their coffees. There were twelve people in total, including two people behind the counter making coffee and taking payment.

Everyone in the store had a mask on and was wearing it properly.

That’s how it is and how is has been in that coffee shop since May 1st when we arrived here.

Wearing a mask is easy. I keep a bunch in my car and one in the pouch on my bike. It’s no big deal to put it on every time I go indoors anywhere other than our home.

I can’t think of anything simpler and more powerful that we can all do other than wearing a mask. I wear one proudly and I hope everyone else does to as long as the pandemic continues.