Kindling is a real-time journal of my attempt to get something going

Do you listen to How I Built This? I do. I love that show. 

But I find myself torn. On one hand, I want to believe that the interviews are instructive, that listening to them is good training for entrepreneurs. On the other hand, every founder on the show has very obviously tailored their narrative for a media audience. Huge swaths of time are glossed over; emotions are distilled; details are lost. Revisionist history. 

This is an oft-recognized problem of Silicon Valley culture: the founder myth. It’s the reason why, for example, we imagine founders as young college dropouts working from their garages, even though the typical successful founder is middle aged. We all know that myths can be wrong and misleading. But myths - all stories - are negative reliefs. They can only happen because we exclude some truth, a LOT of truth. We strip away the boring stuff, the stuff that makes it hard to see “what matters.”

But when anyone is thinking “should I try building a startup,” the boring stuff matters a lot. Here are some of the boring questions I wondered when I was pondering this choice:

  1. When do I leave my day job? 

  2. How do I pay for healthcare? 

  3. How do I organize my new start-up workdays? 

  4. What do I do in the first week? The second week? The third week? 

  5. What kinds of tools are helpful or hurtful?  

  6. What books/podcasts are particularly relevant at each stage of the journey? 

  7. How do I manage my mental health? 

  8. How do I build communities that support my work? 

Much of the “how to” content in circulation - Zero to One, The Lean Startup, etc. - explores the product development journey. And rightfully so: product-market fit is the highest priority for a new business. But the body of “how to” literature around some of the boring questions is far slimmer (YC Startup School addresses many, and I strongly recommend!).

In an effort to add to this particular genre of “how to” literature, I decided to write this blog. I want to capture my real time thoughts, my real time process, my lows, my highs. I want to record my story before I have time to polish it, to take away the inconvenient inconsistencies that are a part of the experience but don’t make for a good 1 hour podcast.

It's n=1, but maybe it's helpful to you. Maybe just a cautionary tale.

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a real-time journal of my attempt to get something going

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Ex-Silver Lake, exploring the pre-seed world