Colorado Startup Life: Week 37

May 19 to 25. This was a good week! I bicycled 92 miles, which is good considering that four days of the week it was wet and rainy and I didn't want to go out and get my bicycle all dirty. My ankle is recovering well. At physical therapy on Friday my therapist said that it was time to start jumping, and next Friday, May 31st, I will run on the Alter G treadmill that they have! I've never seen an Alter G in person until I went to Altitude Physical Therapy, but I'm excited. If it goes well I'll probably run there a couple times a week for the beginning of June until my ankle is a lot stronger.

Saturday in particular was a good day for bicycling. I did 62 miles, from my apartment up Lefthand Canyon, then down the Peak to Peak highway into Lyons and back to my apartment. I rode past the Boy Scout camp I worked at in 2008 and 2010, the Piz Badile, which is a classic beginner trad climb, and plenty of other little cool spots along the front range of Colorado. In fact, the Millsite has closed and is for sale. Maybe I should buy it and only have it open on the weekends in the summer? We used to have a lot of fun there when I worked at the summer camp.

Work was down, and then up. We've been trying and trying and failing and failing at a project, and finally, at 7 PM on Friday night, it worked! The strange thing about my new industry compared to my old industry is that success can be measured in seconds and minutes now, where as in my old industry it was thousands of hours before you had any idea if it was successful. I'll tell you what, the more you fail at something, the more valuable it becomes when you finally succeed.

All startups talk about traction, which is basically being the preferred vendor for your customers, so I will too. When a business starts from scratch there are no customers and no product delivered yet, traction would be getting those early customers and keeping those early customers. We have traction, definitely, that's why I joined this little company last year. I could see that already in it's short life it was filling a need. Now that I've been here eight months I'm not sure we have enough traction. I think we have enough, but again, I've never been through a startup before. At my previous company roles were well defined, we were staffed for trough conditions meaning when business was good we were very busy, but no one was ever really laid off when business was bad, at least among the salaried workers. As we ramp up hiring, without directly ramping up revenue it's a strange feeling. That could all change with the stroke of a pen and a new customer contract, in which case hiring people and getting them up to speed, before the contract is signed is exactly what needs to happen now. I've just never been on the proactive side of business planning. My previous employer was generally reactive to increases in business.

Finally my 15 year class reunion was on Saturday in Kansas... and I didn't go. Friday night as I sat on my couch checking my phone to see our project updates I decided not to drive across the state of Kansas over the weekend. I had a good time at my 10 year high school reunion. However, between my recent pulmonary embolism, likely from driving across Kansas in March 2018, and the possibility that I might have worked over the weekend, I decided not to go. Plus, and I know it's not good to compare yourself to others, but my high school classmates are my ultimate peers, and seeing the vast majority married and with kids, I know I'll feel like a failure, at least as far as my relationships go. Feelings are not fact. I'm sure I'd end up talking about Mt. Everest, and maybe some of them might feel like failures. On top of all that, 15 years! In three years my high school graduation will only be the halfway point in my life. Where has the time gone? Goal for five years from now, have my pilot's license and access to a plane so that my major concern, the pulmonary embolism from 18 hours of sitting would only be six hours of sitting.