I'm tired of being a linchpin.

Just over 10 years ago Seth Godin wrote a book titled Linchpin. It says that instead of thinking about there being workers and management, think of a third group, indispensable "artists". 

Back Cover of Linchpin by Seth Godin

So for a long time I've thought of myself that way. Engineering is art. It's design and manufacturing and testing (which is quantifying practical use). I've tried to learn the things that help people, and I've tried to connect people. I'm tired. 

My company is having a few challenges right now. We physically moved manufacturing in September. Then we changed ERP systems. And we have a few customer deliveries we have to make on a product that we're still having development issues with. Plus, we've probably hired 30 people in the last four months, growing from something like 100 to 130. I'm employee number 27, and due to people who have left my seniority is up to 21. That's another way of saying, I help with on boarding a lot because I've been here longer than most and I enjoy teaching. It's exhausting. 

I desperately want a different role in the company at the moment. I want a slower pace of work. I want the opportunity to get bored enough I read all of my emails. Yet... I can't easily leave. I was playing clean up for two of my coworkers this week, and even my new boss says, "I go to Isaiah to get the history on stuff." My new boss is really good by the way. Last month when I went on vacation, and back in May when I went to Denali, there were gaps. To be more specific, yeah if I quit tomorrow the company would be fine, I'm not actually indispensable, I'm just efficient to ask, but a lot of balls would get dropped along the way. The challenge is when I'm running around trying not to drop balls, I'm not spending any effort to streamline the bowling alley so that the balls flow smoothly and don't get dropped, which means I have to keep chasing stray balls. 

We've onboarded so many new people, that I look at what all the new people are doing, and then what I've done over the last three years and it scares me how many tasks still depend on a single person at the company. It also scares me that we haven't figured out better ways to automate things. It's hard building a company.

A More Holistic View

Last week when I typed out that blog post it surprised some people how stressed I was more than I was expecting. I often like writing because it's a chance to put a thought down, and tweak it seven times before releasing it to the intended audience. Sometimes, well actually a lot, I struggle to say things exactly the way I want to say them. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to say things before I say them. While I don't plan to change that anytime soon, I do realize that sometimes it's better to communicate an unfinished idea so that I can get help with the issue rather than wait for a perfectly fleshed out idea.

That all being said, Monday I walked into a situation I did not see coming at all. It totally blindsided me and changed my perspective. I stand by what I said last week because that's where I was mentally, but in the last seven days wow have I grown! I was humbled by an issue at work that frankly I had basically nothing to do with.

I wasn't sure what words to use exactly in that last sentence and I settled on humbled because while I knew in theory that this situation could happen, I did not feel prepared to be in the middle of it. Fortunately I think it worked out for the best, so I supposed I was prepared for it, but it was a shock. The situation gave me a perspective on my particular role that I didn't have before. In other words, when it felt like my learning was slowing, my eyes were opened to a challenge (and challenges) I had not considered before and the large amount I have left to learn.

Additionally, and not related to the situation above, over the last two days I was able to articulate a few different things that were stressing me out, outside of work, which gave me even more perspective. Which is to say, a few days ago I could barely laugh because the weight of the issues at hand was traumatizing, and now I see so many positives and larger perspectives I can laugh again. In other words, when four things were causing me stress, I focused on the one I could best articulate and the specific items there. However, the four items in context paint a different picture of the situation, of my life situation. So, thank you for the prayers!

Work Stress

It's 11 PM on a Saturday, and I'm awake because just before bed I started thinking about work. We have a reorganization happening Monday which is going to leave a few holes in the org chart and I can't help but feel like my new place in the organization is a demotion. Overall the reorganization is going to be really beneficial, and I'm not being demoted, but there will now be another layer above me in the org chart. I came to a startup to hopefully grow with the company and develop as a leader and get the opportunity to manage, but more than 80% of the company has started after me and I haven't been promoted at all in almost three years despite also being more experienced than most at the company. What am I doing so wrong?

My current role is exhausting. I fail constantly. I end up making all sort of decisions and so many of them are wrong. I'm inches away from quitting. Before getting out of bed to write this I was strategizing how I might go look for another job or if I should just take the plunge and start a company. I'm okay with a little work stress, but a constant stress to fight the fire of the day and get all of the embers out perfectly without using too much water while not choking on the smoke is a really tough ask. 

For years I've known about the FIRE movement, Financial Independence, Retire Early. I passed the point not too long ago that if my sole goal in life was to retire, I could do it today. However, I would basically be relegating myself to a vow of poverty in the USA or living abroad essentially permanently. So I'm not ready to pull the trigger and retire. But I'm 35 years old, for me to have bought into the idea of early retirement feels like a systemic failure of engineering. This stuff is still cool! I still design little parts like my ice axe for fun in the evenings. I'm reading Work by James Suzman right now to try and help understand why I work, and more specifically why we all work so much. 

Friday we had a company party and honestly it was tough at times, so I took a walk part way through to give a tour to my girlfriend. Two days before we had a product failure in testing. That day we had an existing company announce they were going to enter our market and compete with us. During the party the comments from my peers were humbling, and heartbreaking. Two people said they would follow me anywhere. How am I supposed to respond to that? One guy said to me at one point loud enough that at least five coworkers could hear, "Isaiah, I don't know what your career plans are, but we need you as a manager." I quickly replied that yes I did want to be a manger, but it's something that has to happen at the right time and the right situation. It felt like I was digging my own career's grave at this company by being diplomatic. 

I received an email this week from one of the local running store chains that they too were hiring! And hiring managers! A decent sized part of me wants to jump ship and take any management job I can in a company I believe in at the moment. I haven't applied for any jobs or talked to any recruiters because the work I am doing now is really cool, and I like to think that perhaps it will be recognized, and going back to the FIRE comment, it could set me up for life, but is currently in a fragile state where me leaving might have an impact on that success.

When I was away for three weeks in May to Alaska I was really hoping that everything would go smoothly without me, so that I could focus on other issues, longer term issues. In short it didn't go great. As one coworker (who has only been here six weeks) said at the party Friday as he introduced me to his wife, "Isaiah does everyone else's work so he doesn't get a chance to do his." Again, how am I supposed to respond to that?

Pray for me please. I don't have the answers.

The "Hero's" Downtime

Today at work I ignored my email, my Microsoft Teams, and this project management software called Wrike most of the day. I'm sure I'm going to hear about how terrible I am tomorrow at work. At one point a coworker called me and in the process of answering and still trying to turn wrenches I dropped my phone on the concrete floor and cracked the back glass. I can't do it. I can't help everyone at work 9 hours a day every week day. 

I'm burning out. 

The two people before me who held this job both quit, and one didn't have a job lined up at all. I totally get it. This job is unsustainable. I fail constantly. Someone is constantly telling me that I didn't do something. I have an intern this summer and today I spent basically the whole day with her and at one point she said, "this isn't glamorous at all." And I'm not talking like Batman not-glamorous fighting in the shadows, I'm talking garbage truck drivers, pandemic or no pandemic, that's not a glamorous job. Reading between the lines I hear from my intern, 'This company is super cool, but this position is not.'

The Olympics are coming up and I'm excited to watch them. I've often looked at the Olympic runners as inspirational and get excited for them to have their 15 minutes of fame. But as I get older I realize, it's easy for 15 minutes... but it's basically impossible for the long haul. I wish I could sleep 11 hours a day, run 3 hours a day, and then spend another 3 hours on ancillary exercises and massage and physical therapy, and then basically just eat and lounge around for the remainder. I come home from work most days pretty exhausted. If I can get out and run or bicycle it's a good day. 

Last night, Wednesday the 14th of July, I was driving home from my girlfriend's house listening to 95.7 The Party here in Denver and they had a "Free Britney" special on the radio. It was all Britney Spears for the 15 minutes that I listened. She's in this conservatorship that her dad runs, and it's kind of ridiculous. I mean, she's like 38, she can handle her life at this point! But I get it, she's had a camera on her every move for the last what, 23 years? Of course she's going to lash out at times when she just needs a quiet night  to laugh with a few friends or watch a comforting movie on the couch and yet the paparazzi follow her everywhere. 

Last year at my little startup we had a company wide meeting and the CEO called me out, in a very positive way, for asking him random questions from time to time. Apparently I'm the only one in the company that does that. I immediately thought, 'ARE YOU KIDDING ME PEOPLE! HE'S JUST A PERSON TOO!' I'm not very close to our CEO, but it definitely feels at times like he's a little socially isolated. He's doing a good job and I want to reach out in some small way and help him feel like part of the team, not just the CEO. In other words, for a person that has to deal with curveballs, sliders, and fast balls every day, lob him a softball every now and then. 

The point of all these stories is that humans want to belong, we want to contribute, but we don't want to be overwhelmed. When we get overwhelmed, things break, and those things might be us.

Perfectly Overwhelmed

It's been a long time with no blog posts. In part that's because of my newish role at work. I interact with a lot of people and so any talk I have about others at work would be immediately obvious who I was talking about, and I don't want to write anything about my friends without their consent. It's also due to my running being so mediocre compared to where it was prior to 2018 and the pulmonary embolism and broken ankle. Next, I haven't felt exactly like I'm "learning to do" a lot in 2020, it was kind of a rough year, with a lot of triage just doing, and not taking the time to learn. I took time to reflect, but not necessarily learn. Then of course taking care of my own mental health. On the upside I have a girlfriend, and that's going really really well. For example, we spent six hours together the other day and spent about five of those hours talking with each other, it's pretty great.

Let me get to the point, in my department we've had five new people start in the last six months including two in essentially the same role I have. All sorts of great questions have come up, such as, "What should I be working on?" We've come up with a prioritization system of the daily highest priorities to address that. The next issue is dealing with the volume of work that is headed at our little group. It's actually been comforting to me as my new coworkers become "overwhelmed" because that's exactly how I felt at the end of the summer as we were trying to ship a lot of product and people I was relying on were leaving the company for more money and a more suitable culture to their personalities. Plus, back then there was no one to ask for help. The defining moment was a Saturday when I and another coworker who has been at our company for two years showed up for half an hour when FedEx arrived to pick up a Custom Critical shipment to a customer (who still have not used the product yet months later). It was simply exhausting, and it just felt very isolating because instead of having a team to help I felt like, 'who's going to do this, because person X and Y left? ... I guess I'm going to do this.'

The situation was clearly an issue, so we reorganized and hired those five people I'm talking about. We've started to hit a stride in the last couple weeks. We're kind of at the peak wave for paper work in 2020 in my department. In other words, in a few weeks the changes will have settled down so the paperwork is taken care of and it's really hardware problems we're dealing with, which is of course more fun. There will likely be another paperwork surge late in 2021, but depending on how the next few months of design go, it may be 2022. 

The point being, the new employees seem to be perfectly overwhelmed. It's crept up to too overwhelmed at times, and when that happens I try to step in and ease the burden, but I'll admit I can only do so much, and frankly most of them have skills I don't have. At many of the old established companies things move so slow people are not engaged, they are not overwhelmed at all. Often the expected daily work can be done in half a day by an experienced employee. At some of the other startups in my industry people are too overwhelmed and just burn out after several years. There is this happy medium where the work is exciting, there is a lot of it, and when you leave at the end of the day you feel like you did enough and aren't letting the company down because you want to go on a run and take care of your mental health and family. I think we're pretty close to perfect in that realm. Personally I think we are closer to the burnout side than the not engaged side, but close enough that I'm not a black sheep when I leave at 4 PM for the day. 

I've been excited the whole time I've been at my current company, all two years and five months of it, but recently I've gotten to be the most excited I've ever been about it. It's like the feeling when you leave the South Col at 8:30 pm for the summit of Mt. Everest. I had been waiting 12 years for that night, and when it happens, and the weather is objectively great you know it's going to be a good day just doing what you've been preparing to do for years. That's how I feel now at work. We're not at the summit but we know what it takes, and the path is incredibly clear the next year and a half. 

A New, Positive, Perspective

 The last few weeks have been rough. #understatement 

Work has been eventful... and I mean stressful for me. After not shipping one of our products since September 2019, we shipped five in eight days. Shipping is stressful as it's letting our works of art out into public to be judged. I took a new role in September, and whew it's been difficult! I took it, because the last two people in that role quit and who else was going to do it? Yet I quickly learned why it's so difficult. It's a nexus for both information, and physical hardware, and when any aspect of those two things don't get done a certain way by a certain time, it falls to this role. In my previous role I was responsible on the digital and information side, which is a strong suit for me, now I'm getting into the actual hardware too, which contains more data. I'll get back to that. Plus, not sure you've seen, but the USA had an election recently and Covid-19 cases are skyrocketing around the country.

Add it all up and I felt overwhelmed. 

My boss, who I am very open about with my struggles, offered to go to lunch, and as we were heading out the door, another coworker, and very good friend of my boss, who I'll call A, asked to come with us. I was planning to tell my manager the struggles of the day, but A beat me to it, by going on a ten minute description of the issues he was working on. It blew my mind! I was aware of two issues he brought up, but a few others were new to me. I also realized, 'wait, I can help here.' I have the skills to maybe not help with these immediate issues, but I can make sure that in three weeks, he won't have to deal with these issues again, at least for the next 9+ months... until we have another ground up redesign effort, but possibly never again, if we can front load some existing software tools we use.

Ten minutes later when we were eating and I was then asked about what was up in my world, I said with a small laugh, "I think A about covered it." My first thought about what I was feeling in that moment was, 'misery loves company' but that's not exactly the feeling or perspective change I had. My mind shift was more, 'the things that are stressing me out are stressing me out because I'm currently responsible for them in a way that I have not been before. So I kind of don't know what I'm doing. But! We are nearing the end of this surge and it is a great time to reevaluate HOW we do things so that a person does not get put in my position, or for that matter A's position during the next surge.' In other words, exactly what I came to a startup to do, build a company by building the processes and roles to systematically create a physical product where there previously was none. In the depths of the trenches I've been in the last few weeks, I've only seen the mud, not the whole battlefield. However, I've now been at the company through three product kickoffs and two product launches, in addition to the kickoffs and launches that I saw at my previous company. I have the experience.

Point being, it's easiest to map a process when you've done every step of it, or at least witnessed them all. And once you have a map, you can get from start to finish more reliably without getting lost, which makes the stress levels go down. You can onboard people and describe to them how to do it. Ultimately you can optimize the process. And my manager actually suggested to me this week, I should write all this down, so that we don't forget it, so that we don't have things fall through the cracks. Honestly, I'm delighted to go spend some time working on that. It's great when you have a thought about going to do something that needs to be done, and then your boss has the same thought and gives you the assignment. 

To step out more broadly, my family and closest friends are taking Covid-19 super seriously. As a competitive runner, I don't want any lasting lung or heart damage from getting the disease. I'm only socializing with a single person in this current wave. She's the only person in my Covid-19 bubble. And seeing all of these people I care about take it so seriously, I have a lot of hope that through Zoom calls, phone calls, texts and some socially distanced outdoor adventures we'll make it through this winter just fine. Oh we'll drink too much alcohol, and have lots of negative depressing thoughts, and anxiety when we have to interact with strangers, but ultimately we won't be dying. I read in an article today, "If you're not dead, you're winning."

So I'm optimistic. We're going to get through this. I'm going to get through this. 2020 is a learning experience that we will all pass on to future generations. As my blog is titled, we are learning to do, and in this case the doing is very difficult right now, and many will suffer mental health effects for a long time, let alone the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. Many people have been humbled this year, which is often a hard experience, but I'm optimistic that will allow us to help each other heal in years to come.

To Succeed as an Employee in a Startup Company...

I'm nearing two years at this little startup company, and we've changed a number of times since I got here. I'm on my fourth organizational structure and third boss. In the last org shake up my boss and I headed the same direction and I'm actually the only person from his old reports that still report to him. Funny enough, I'm actually the only person in my group, my box of the org chart. We're hiring!

We've had a few people leave recently, two nearing 10 years total experience in their 30s and two in their younger 20s, like 23-24. When you break down each person's reasons for leaving they all make sense. Yet, in such a small and young company there is a big sense of loss with each departure. So I've been thinking about why they left and what we might have done differently to either keep them longer, or give them a better picture of the work they were going to do here. And I had a realization...

In a big established company people who are professionally successful are good at going through the existing processes and producing work in accordance with those norms, and people who are comfortable navigating the bureaucracy of a large complicated organization. In a really small company, like less than 20 people, maybe up to 35 people, the ones who are successful get things done. Pure and simple they just produce results. However, to thrive in a startup as it grows you can't just be a person that gets things done, or a person that follow the processes. This has taken me a long time to articulate... Success for a person in a startup comes from being able to just get things done, and then articulate and communicate the process you used to get things done, so that it can be replicated and scaled up. 

Realizing that was a game changer for me in the last few days. Of course as the company grows the quality expectations grow too so processes necessarily get more complicated with more checks to poor work. We had a person leave a few months ago who was good at getting things done, but she was pretty terrible about articulating all of the things she did or communicating those things to people. She had previously worked at a startup where there were three engineers for the whole five years she was there, so all of the engineers knew everything about the product. At our company the product is too complex for any one person to know all of the details. However, the flip side of that is that we don't have the formal processes that a 50 year old company has, so on boarding new people can be a little chaotic and I think we struggle to articulate the expectations. For example, a person with 10 years at established companies might be exasperated at the pace of product change and in particular at the lack of rigor that sometimes happens when we make a change to our product. On the other hand the new graduate has no frame of reference for what it's like to work at a company with established processes so she is free to change things that would never be permitted for such an inexperienced person at a larger company.

Honestly, my company has had a lot of failures when it comes to articulating (which is something you can do in your own head) and communicating how we do things. In particular, we bring people in, we don't give them all the information about how someone else used to do that job, and we expect them to do the job even as we double in size and the requirements from that position change. When I read entrepreneurs writing about how hard it is to build a company, I get it now. Let me put that another way, people crave a process. That's a good article linked there by the way. So I haven't actually been promoted in two years, so take my advice with a grain of salt. However, I have quantified, clarified, and attempted to communicate the processes that I work most closely with and as a result people often default to my processes for things that really might be better suited to a different process. While this may not have resulted in my being promoted, it definitely has affected my peers who seem to enjoy this small amount of structure that we have to document our work. 

Taking the next leap, I've been thinking quite a bit more this summer about a company I'd like to start. The core technology isn't ready yet, but it could be in the next year or two. So all of the hurdles that I am going through with my current company are excellent examples of what to do and what not to do. I think that I've learned enough that I could seriously cut a year of development time from company founding to product launch, maybe even in only four years. Of course, I'm waiting for a certain technology item to be somewhat proven before I launch, and right now it is clearly not proven, so I'm still learning.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 84

Another week, being employed, working semi-hard. I worked six days, all but Easter, and it was like drinking from a firehose most of the time. Requests came in from all directions and while trying to address them all, I made a mistake.

I'm not actually upset about it. Usually I beat myself up when I make a mistake. However, I'm in therapy trying to look at the bigger picture. Frankly, I was rushed, and made a relatively simple error at 5:30 pm on Friday, on a project where I see a limited amount of value added. I didn't even know about it until Saturday morning. Sigh... It's just one of those errors where I'm like, 'eh, on to the next one.'

I ran 30.5 miles, didn't get a long run in this week because my ankle started acting up, specifically a tendon on the outside of my ankle.

We're going to get there, we're going to be okay, even it takes two years of this kind of shutdown. Here is the best article of the last couple days I have read about how we will open up from this shutdown/lockdown.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 83

I ran only 27.2 miles last week. It's kind of the upside of the week, despite being a big dip from last week. I purposely took Sunday off after a step up of 12 miles last Saturday, then ran Monday but work was a bit stressful this week so I didn't run Tuesday through Thursday. Friday things eased up a little and I want for a run again. Saturday I went big and did 14.6 miles! That's the longest run post ankle breaking I've had. Oh I'm older now and my ankle was sore after, but I'm okay. I mean... that's training. Building mileage I have always found to be the hardest and as I get older and deal with more significant setbacks that is definitely true.

I went into work on Palm Sunday, and then every normal work day. We made a lot of good progress this week, but it had it's stressful moments. In particular, I sometimes send out a daily update email on our progress when we're nearing a product release. I'm not really a fan because day to day progress can vary widely, and seems to bring up more questions than answers. I'm more a fan of weekly updates because that's how you can see progress or not. These aren't simple engineering tasks we're dealing with and we can't just work harder and do 30% more every day. Sometimes you can, but frequently you can't.

On top of that, this was the fourth week of people working remote. It's an adventure. Everyone is a little more on edge. We all want the same thing, but when we can't "see" people at their desks working on it, it's hard to know that work is getting done. It is getting done, quite a bit too. Frankly, when it comes to hardware companies (not software or services) we have got to be one of the best positioned to weather this crisis. We can build products with 2-5 people in the office (should be two with better communication, but it's more like five at the moment as we figure out communication). We can then test products with four people. That's it. We don't need 200 people on an assembly line to make our product. We're very very engineering intensive and low on the actual number of assembly and test people needed. Honestly, it's a pretty great spot to be as a company in April 2020.

I have mixed feelings on the Covid-19 coronavirus. A part of me thinks, 'we're all, or at least 40% of us are going to get this before we get a vaccine, might as well get it now.' Another part of me thinks, 'if I get this, I will inevitably spread it to someone over 60 who will die.' Another part of me wonders, 'if we value each life at $9 million in the USA, how long can we shut down the discretionary part of the economy before we just give up and try and try to go back to normal?' Reopening the country is going to be interesting. The adventures I'm planning for the coming months are all a little stealthy. Meaning, the only real infrastructure I need for them are gas stations and roads that are still open. Everything else I could possibly carry with me.

The weather is going to be a little bad this week, and I'll be in the office, so fairly bland as far as the blog goes. Although, hopefully we get past my portion of the product release, which is a pretty huge accomplishment.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 82

The Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020... What a story we are living through. What is the summer and fall going to look like?

Overall it was a good week for me. I was fairly productive at work. Frankly, I'm pleasantly happy with my productivity working from home. It's not that great, but then again I started therapy back in February because I was stressed out that I "wasn't enough" at basically anything. So I'm getting better with being enough.

I ran 41.5 miles! I said back in early March that when we got to working from home, I was basically just going to run and that would be it. No climbing. No mountains, because I don't want to put anyone else in danger if I would get injured and need a rescue. I've never needed a rescue and I've offered more than once to help in a rescue, including being first on the scene of a basejumping accident in Moab in November. Point being, it's just too much of a risk for me to be out doing anything other than very basic mountain sports right now.

My life was super basic. I didn't touch any common door handles with my hand this week, I always use my sleeve now, and always wear long sleeves, like a hoodie, when I go out. Wake up, work, spend too much time reading coronavirus articles, work some more, send a daily update email, call someone, go run, watch a movie, drink too much alcohol and go to bed too late. While that could be perceived as depressing, it's not. This "sacrifice" that I am going through, isolating and cutting off interactions with people, it's minor and temporary. I'm very very fortunate that I have the wealth and the income right now that millions of Americans and probably billions around the world do not have. Meaning, I now pay $80 a month for high speed Internet at home, and I can afford that because I still have a good paying job. Sigh... all of the economically unfortunate people that might go through what I went through in 2010.

The thing that worries me the most about this whole pandemic is not the economic fall out, or the sickness itself, but the deaths. I think the USA will pass 27,000 deaths this coming week, we're at 9,616 as I write this. My heart aches knowing that is coming.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 81

March 22 to 28. I'm optimistic, because I have to be. I think about death and injuries a lot. This was the second week I spent working from home. Unfortunately I don't think my productivity was as good as last week. It's harder to know what's going on. Where as normally when two people talk in the office, another two might be nearby and join in the conversation and then each person goes off and tell another person what's happening, so now eight people know. However, when everything is being forced to happen remote, two people talk and make a plan, and that's kind of it. Those incidental conversations aren't really happening as much. So if you want to know what's going on, you have to dig and pry a little more than normal.

On the flip side, wow am I in a fortunate situation! We're set up to work from home quite well. Because of a couple government contracts we count as essential, and I'm excited about that for probably different reasons than you might expect. It's not about the revenue that is coming in or the fact that we're still testing our product, it's that I have something to do right now that gives me purpose. I'm spending plenty of time reading news articles about the Covid-19 pandemic, plenty of time watching The Office, and it's nice to be able to sink my brain into a cool project right now that still adds value. I told my boss this past week, even if we do get shut down, I want to keep working on this stuff because it gives me something to do. I've even offered to take a pay cut or forgo my salary for awhile. I'm confident that if my company survives the next five years, I won't have any basic financial worries.

If you haven't read the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink I recommend it. In fact, I might reread it while I'm homebound. So often in life the focus is on more money, but he points out that after our basic needs are satisfied, we are looking for autonomy to do our jobs as we see fit, mastery of our profession, and purpose to make the world better in some way. I'm in a good spot financially being a saver and working for the last ten years, and so I really don't want to lose the purpose aspect of my career right now. I have plenty of autonomy and mastery, but if we had to shut down and I was not allowed to work, oh that would be tough for me now.

Running was good, 43 miles I think? I ended on Saturday with an 11 mile long run, my longest pure run in over a year. My ankle is sore right now as I write this. The 22nd, Sunday, I spent 8 hours and did 14.5 miles on skis with M for this 25th birthday. Conditions were not great so we turned around at 11,100 feet of elevation. I think I'm going to try and hover around the 40-45 miles per week mark for the next month or so and hopefully my ankle will rise to the challenge and not be sore as frequently as it was this week.

Predictions for the coming week: The USA passes 250,000 Covid-19 cases on Friday, and 5,000 deaths on Thursday. But honestly my predictions have been too optimistic and so there is a good chance we pass those milestones before then.

Colorado Startup Life: Weeks 79 and 80

Wow! has the wold changed in the last two weeks?! If you haven't seen the 2011 movie Contagion, go watch it, because we're heading in that direction, albeit with a virus that is fortunately only 10% as deadly as the one in the movie (3% vs 30%).

Week 79, March 8th to 14th, was pretty good. We basically shipped our fourth product to a customer. Our products are expensive and complex, so the fact that we've shipped four is pretty good. Although, the highlight of the week was taking Wednesday off to climb Mt. Antero with the woman who will be known as A1. She's a nurse and so has a crazy schedule, so we were the only two people at all on Mt. Antero Wednesday the 18th. We made the summit, and it was a very good 13 hour mountain day.

Friday the 13th was basically my last day in the office for some time. This whole Covid-19 thing has upended the world, as it should. 90% of my company is working from home now, we need a few people to build products and a few people to test them, otherwise, everyone else is at home.

Week 80, March 15th to 21st, my first week working fully from home was an adventure. For starters, I'm still working on developing a routine. Instead of wake up, get dressed, head to work, maybe via Starbucks, and then eat breakfast at work and get into the day, suddenly, there's no 7:30 AM morning meeting to try to make it to the office to hear. Starbucks seems like a risk (even though I went twice this week, and bought some stock). Our formal office hours are 9-4... and typically I'm in the office well before 9, although, when working from home by myself, in a pandemic, it's easy to read all of the European updates from overnight, and not get into my work computer until 9. On the other hand, one day I did have the work computer open at 6 AM because I couldn't sleep, and work is a great distraction from the ever rising death count. I'm getting better at working from home. Honestly, it wasn't an unproductive week. I didn't get as much done as maybe my average week, but I have definitely had less productive weeks. In short, I'm still figuring it out.

In big news, I ran, hiked and backcountry skied 41 miles this week! That's my biggest week in a long time. Plus it was fairly consistent. Being shut in all day makes me so look forward to getting out and running. It's a risk, running through a tunnel with low airflow or within four feet of another person, and I'm very aware that going on a run might be how I catch Covid-19.

I'll try saying this more, but to be clear, I'm trying hard to be optimistic about any aspect of this pandemic I can. Why? Because it's bad. This will definitely kill more Americans than September 11th, and most likely kill more than the resulting wars did too. We're at 414 deaths as I write this but by the end of this week I would be surprised if it's less than 2,000.When I think of at risk groups, people with lung issues, general health issues, etc. I am 99% sure that I will know someone that dies from this. Who will that person be? I don't know. I think of the last five churches I attended in Clinton, Sheboygan Falls, Dubuque, Independence, and now Longmont, and there are so many people that have health issues. I only touched four door handles this week (yes the whole seven days) other than my own door and car, Starbucks twice, and two at Fedex. I'm not taking this thing as no big deal. I like to think I have a healthy level of paranoia. Boulder County where I live has 37 confirmed cases, up from 11 on Friday. Many more people will die, because we aren't really testing everyone to know who is carrying it. And ultimately that's why I'm staying home so much. I don't want to be an "innocent" carrier of this thing to the many at risk people I know. Considering my pulmonary embolism in 2018, who knows, this thing could kill me. If that happens don't let my sister spend more than 20% of the money she gets on a new car.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 78

Another good week. I'd be lying if I said it was great, maybe more of an average week, but it was good. Where to start...

So I'm in therapy, the counseling kind, and I'm telling lots of people because we're pretty terrible not only in the USA, but most of the world to admit when we're mentally struggling. It's already helped a lot. It's nice to have an outside perspective to frame things in my life differently than anyone in my life frames them. I can be super hard on myself, and while others see that and try to comfort me, it's just not the same as someone totally removed from all of the situations to more objectively give a perspective.

Work was good. It was the first week without the coworker I used to work closely with. So I took on some of her tasks. While I do enjoy them, especially as something new and different to do, instead of designing yet another little bracket, it's stressful because I don't really like feeling indispensable. I like feeling valuable for sure, but at the moment I feel like I'm holding a few pieces together and I'd really like to implement some processes to clarify communication without a step that just says "Isaiah"... so I can take more vacation. Of course, my feelings are not the facts, and if I get hit by a bus today my coworkers will all very quickly figure out how to fill my shoes. I'm pretty sure actually that I've documented things fairly well. Of course understanding feelings versus reality is a big part of the reason I'm in therapy, and I've got a fair amount left to work on.

I only ran once, for eight miles. I spent a lot of time recovering from the 31 mile 10,500 feet of elevation double Boulder skyline traverse last weekend.

Saturday I skied with A and R who I met way back in 2015 in Italy at an ultramarathon, and we all reconnected and are living out here now and all have ski passes to Arapahoe Basin. We had a lot of good conversation, I may have a little bit of a vulnerability hangover from all the conversation.

I hope you had a good week too. Also, if you haven't seen the 2011 movie "Contagion" I highly recommend it. It puts this little Covid-19 corona virus in perspective.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 77

What an incredible week! I have the best life in the world. I hope that you think that about your own life, but mine is really great. And honestly, I think it will simply get better.

I ran and backcountry skied I think 42 miles or so over the week, with 31 of them being a double traverse of the Boulder Skyline Saturday with my friend M, and also J and T joined for a single traverse each and W was so generous to crew for us for 12 hours. We started at the Mt. Sanitas trailhead, did that, then went up Flagstaff, then up over Green, Bear and South Boulder peak and down to the Mesa Trailhead. After 25 minutes of eating chips and guacamole, we headed back up the not easy Shadow Canyon trail. My GPS died at 28.5 miles in 10:23 total time and 10,500 feet of vertical ascent.

My quads are shot today. I'm walking around stiff and sore... but no pain! At one point running down the snow on the northwest side of Green Mountain I rolled my left ankle, and instead of it being a two week setback as it was in 2019 every time I rolled it, it was almost no problem. Today, my left ankle is barely any more sore than my right, and not nearly as sore as my quads, which is a huge step forward in the ski injury recovery!

On the work front a coworker I worked closely with had her last day on Friday, and I will be taking up part of her role, which is a stressful. However, on Monday I had my first therapy session. I frequently blame myself for group problems that I feel I may have been able to change and improve. My therapist had an exercise for this sort of thing. Basically, I'm lying to myself that I "control" the situation. (For those that are new to my blog, I despise the word control, we rarely have control of anything, more accurately we have varying degrees of influence, so I much prefer the word influence.) So I was asked to identify the lie that I was telling myself, which is that I could have changed the situation. I'm just one small part of the puzzle, the organization. It's not all up to me. Very little is up to me really. We have many different people involved in different aspects of this particular situation, and I certainly don't "control" it. Which has already helped me feel better.

That all being said, I do actually think it's for the best, my coworker leaving at this time. It has already forced me to grow and learn exactly what she did. Several weeks ago I had a fear that it was all in her head, and that we had terrible records, but as I have dove into the documentation (her documentation), we're going to be alright. As her leaving has already forced me to grow, I am confident that it will force others to step up and grow and take on additional responsibility as well. Specifically, understanding the details of how we get from A to B, so that we can then teach new people how we do that, and fewer things will fall through the cracks. That is for the best, because in different ways, we all leaned on her, not exactly understanding 100% what she did. Frankly, she wasn't very good at describing what she did, so it was hard for the rest of us to understand what she did. Now that I've learned more about her role, I'll sum up her role in one word: communication. In other words, while I viewed it all being in her head, that's simply because she communicated with the largest number of people about our product, at least of the people in her department. You see, while we may have only a short description of a product that seems poorly documented, the details are documented in 15 different locations, and the communication happened in person, so there wasn't a clear (but complex) digital trail all of the time.

Going forward, I expect more documentation, or more specifically, links to the documentation and clarification of that communication and documentation process. In short, when a company is 25 people, it's easy to talk to everyone and know what's going on. When it's 65 people it's not automatic, and if people aren't trying to pay attention they will feel, and be, out of the loop. Again, we're going to learn and grow from this, and ultimately I do feel it is for the best, but bare with me if I am stressed in the coming weeks as I take on parts of her role, because I will have to drop parts of what I used to do the last 17 months. I joined a startup knowing it would have difficult times like this, and while it stresses me out, it's fascinating! There is so much learning to be had here. Learning that might possibly have never happened for me at a big company.

In other news, I've said before and I'll say again, I think the meaning of life is relationships. I'm in the process of developing or deepening a number of relationships. Some are directly related to the work stress above, where we are getting to know each other due to the challenges we are facing. Some are in parallel to the work stress where the relationship is separate but influenced by those events, even if we never discuss those challenges. Still a third group is entirely outside of anything work related, but I'm allowing those people to see me in a vulnerable light, and that builds trust. I'm quite excited for 2020!

Colorado Startup Life: Weeks 75 and 76

February 9th to 22nd. Life... am I right? Is everyone stressed out? Just when you think another person is doing just fine, no he's stressed out and she's stressed out too.

For the first time in a long time, let's start with running mileage! Week 75 was 25 miles, and week 76 was a whopping 35 miles! (Part of those 35 miles are skiing downhill after skinning uphill, so I'm keeping them. Some miles of skiing are just a tiring as running a mile. Most are harder than walking a mile. Friday night I ran eight miles, it's the longest run I have done yet in my 11 month long ankle recovery, just a few weeks after doing seven miles for the first time. It was amazing! The way my body has recovered in 2020 so far looks like this might be a really exciting year!

Work has been stressful. Outside of work has been stressful. So I'm going to do something I haven't done in 15 years (to the month actually) go to therapy, like the mental health counseling kind. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to talk about this publicly, because not many people do. It's still a bit of a taboo, people will admit to going (admit being an emotional word there indicating failure) and talk about it in private, but there is more talk about the dentist or how you do your taxes than your mental health.

What else? I did backcountry skiing the last two weekends, first from A-Basin up to Loveland Pass on the 15th, and second on Mt. Elbert February 22nd. Mt. Elbert was hard enough that my friend, who had his first time skinning uphill on skis said it was the physically hardest thing he had ever done. I love pushing people to new limits! That puts me at seven successful calendar winter 14er summits for 21 attempts. Since getting alpine touring skis I'm probably getting over 50% success, before that I wallowed in deep snow frequently.

Colorado Startup Life: Weeks 60-74

October 27th, 2019 to February 8th, 2020. I haven’t blogged much in the past few months, for a few different reasons. Fear, insecurity, depression, the usual suspects. Okay that’s not very specific at all… Let’s put some numbers to it. Since step count is a great measure of activity, and since my physical activity can sometimes be a microcosm for my whole life, here are my monthly step count totals for the last year (rounded to the nearest thousand):

March: 117,000

April: 164,000

May: 330,000

June: 394,000

July: 413,000

August: 464,000

September: 477,000

October: 338,000

November: 347,000

December: 353,000

January: 355,000

My ankle recovery kept going better and better, after all I did 20 14ers in 2019. However when October hit and it started snowing, but my ankle still wasn’t good enough to run on consistently yet, so overall I took a big step back in the amount of physical activity I was doing. Frequently, when running is going well, everything else is going well, and running wasn’t going well. I would run or climb and tweak my ankle. That happened frequently in the summer, but I could simply take an easy day or two and then go hike a mountain and get 30,000 steps, but in the winter it’s much harder simply to walk outside. Each step takes more effort.

Other things, my parents lived with me for three and a half weeks back in November. I love my parents, but it was cramped in my 950 sq. ft. apartment and I wanted some alone time, and going out to a coffee shop to blog doesn’t really count as alone time for me at this point in my life, it's like semi-social. Plus, this blog started way back in 2009 as a way to express myself and tell stories once instead of seven times to seven different people. Being in such close proximity to people that were curious about my every day made it less relevant to blog about my week, when I had already discussed it. 

Along the lines of the step count, there is an interesting article on inc.com about Hubspot and the dip that employees between 1 and 2 years there were facing. I had never heard of such a dip, yet as I passed a full year and entered my second at work, I felt (and maybe am feeling) a bit of a dip too. If I look back I think that I had these dips in previous jobs too. I’ve never actually held the same role for three years. I’ve passed two years in two different roles, but I wonder if the seeds of my moving to a new role after two years were set in that one to two year motivation dip. I don’t know. Also, since mid 2011, I have held every role (and I’m in my fifth since then) for at least a year, perhaps suggested I entered the dip in all five roles. Again, I don’t know. 

Another work related issue that has frustrated me the past few months is my own ego. We are a company of young people, which is to say we’re still figuring things out, our processes and our communication and even our decision making. I come from a very different industry at a super established company where we had processes for everything, including our decision making, and communication was generally very clear. I get frustrated when I see things being done in a very different way than I am used to, or things that are simply not being done at all. Yet I honestly don’t know if the way I am used to is better, or that I was simply used to it and change is hard? Also, things that I perceive as not being done might not need to be done, or just aren’t communicated to me that they are being done. On top of all that, I feel as an individual contributor, new to this industry, that my voice has almost no weight, so I don’t always speak up. But! Feelings are not fact. As I look around at our company where I will shortly have more seniority than two thirds of the people in the company, if I am afraid to speak up, there is no hope that the younger people, with less experience and less confidence will speak up. …which also stresses me out because frankly I don’t want to be the grown up in the room who is obligated to speak up, like Conrad Anchor deciding to turn his younger partners around on Meru. I couldn't finish one of Dietrich Bonhafer’s books because he speaks quite a bit about speaking up, and the guy was killed by the Nazis in April 1945 because of his speaking up. 

Where I was trying to go with that paragraph is to say that speaking up requires a certain amount of confidence, and I can have the unfortunate result of coming off arrogant and not humble when speaking up, and how do you thread that needle? As I’ve said before about running, and it applies to mountain climbing and also business, confidence can be mistaken for arrogance, even within myself. I might think it’s just my confidence but maybe it’s arrogance and ego thinking I am better than I am. In other words, speaking up carries the risk of being labeled an egotistical trouble maker, but not speaking up carries the risk that the people at the top are blindsided by the happenings on the floor.

The difference between my life now and in the past at work is that there is an urgency about our business, a feast or famine possibility for us. As in, we (and that definitely includes me) have to succeed or we’ll get acquired by a giant company and our dreams dashed. I want to help, but I’m not sure how, and frankly as a very sinful human it’s entirely possible I’m hurting more than I’m helping. #depressiontalking

Sigh…

So, in other news I’ve been out ice climbing seven days and skiing eight days this winter. I checked off Culebra Peak leaving me with eight 14ers in Colorado to go. I led a ten person trip to Ouray, and had a great time! Everyone there had quite a bit less ice climbing experience than me. It was interesting, I went with friends and coworkers, and we grew to know each other better, which to be honest was a little intimidating. For example, I bought a 2008 BMW X5 in December for $6,000 and unfortunately on the drive back it was low on coolant, but we couldn’t open the hood to add more. So on Sunday afternoon in Grand Junction we took it to a mechanic, and he spent an hour taking some panels off and told us that based on the size of the leak, he really really didn’t recommend driving it back to Denver. So I rented a car and we drove back. It was somewhat humiliating. My friends had the opportunity to see how I handled a stressful situation like that, and I got to see their reactions as well, and while it was overall a very positive and relatively minor travel delay, getting seen in that way, being a little more vulnerable is hard. My friends are amazing! I just didn't want them to see that side of me. I keep lot of people at arms length emotionally, especially coworkers, because again it’s hard to open up and be vulnerable and admit how imperfect our lives are. I’ve cried a lot recently. I have the best life in the world. I’m sitting on my couch now looking at my other couch with six different jackets draped over it, all for slightly different things, what great wealth I have! Why me?

I went to Minnesota and saw many relatives at a funeral. Don’t feel bad about it, she was 91, a Christian, a widow, and had severe Alzheimers the last three years so it was very expected. I took a trip to Canada to ice climb in November, the highlight being climbing Murchison Falls. I went to Moab in November and did some rock climbing, which included me taking a 30 foot lead fall on the first pitch of the North Chimney on Castleton tower when my .75 green Camalot which was only retracted 20-30% pull out of the rock. That day Brad Gobright was doing a 5.13 right beside with his posse and filming drone, and three weeks later he died in a rappelling accident. 

In December I took a short trip to Red Rocks, but it rained so we drove 3.5 hours to Joshua Tree and climbed two days there, where my climbing partner took a 20+ foot fall on a “5.5” slab… which was more like 5.8 or even 5.9 slab if you ask me, it was hard! For Thanksgiving my parents rented a condo at Copper Mountain and I skied three days and we hung out with my sister’s now husband. It was really nice to spend that time together. We even tried ice climbing at Vail one day, but didn’t make it up the approach.

That’s all out of order, there is a variety of Facebook evidence out there if you want to know actual dates. 

I’m blogging now because of the week I had. About two weeks ago I bottomed out emotionally, cried a lot. I’m on the upswing now, which still involves a fair amount of crying. However I had some moments this week that were really really good. A coworker of mine, a new program manager was vulnerable with me and admitted his inexperience in one small particular matter, and it was something we frequently did at my old job. So I spent a couple hours quantifying a process (just one tool, not the ultimate one, but another tool) and gave it to him. Two different coworkers pulled me aside and asked in short “how’s it going?” I wasn’t expecting that. I guess I’m not the best in the world at hiding my emotions. Plus, a number of my friends lately have been struggling with different issues, and as I try to empathize with them, I take on a little of their struggle, and that combined with a $2,700 BMW repair bill, a funeral, and everything I’ve mentioned in the last 1800 words, whew, I’ve been better. But those gestures by my coworkers made me feel better. Then Friday night I did some indoor climbing and had dinner with a close climbing partner friend of mine, and we had good conversation. Saturday I went skiing with another close climbing partner friend of mine who I had not seen in years, and I’m pretty sure I committed to doing Denali in May of 2021 (and maybe actually leading the expedition). Which I’ve been meaning to do for some time now, but I’m guessing I could get six, maybe even eight people together to do it, we’re already at three. If you want to go, contact me and if you’re qualified and I am ready to spend three weeks on a glacier with you, you can come. Only requirement is that I’m skiing, I’m not snowshoeing. 

Point being, all that vulnerability in the past week refilled my well of motivation to blog and it off loaded some of my stress. And confirmed, again, that being vulnerable is a good thing, it leads to deeper stronger relationships. I am not alone. And it’s encouraged me to seek out a little more vulnerability, even if that means more stressful empathizing again in the future.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 59

October 20th to 26th. Another good week at work and outside of work. The lowlight was being out sick most of Monday and Tuesday. On Sunday I climbed the 3rd flatiron for the third time with one of my coworkers who wants to learn to trad lead, and it just was too hard for the sore throat and runny nose that I had. I recovered toward the end of the week, but no one likes being out sick.

It's funny how being out sick gives us guilt. I'll tell you what, if retirement is anything like being sick every day, meaning no place to go, nothing to do, than it's not for me. I do usually tell sick people to just go home, and it can be hard to take my own medicine, and go home.

Being sick was definitely the major event of the week. I didn't go rock climbing, I only ran once for 3 miles on Friday after work. Basically I went home every day and laid on the couch. Saturday after spending the majority of the day laying around, I finally went for a little 29 mile bicycle ride, because it was 76 degrees out and probably the last good day for road bicycling for awhile.

If there is a startup lesson for this week it is chapter 7 from the book Extreme Ownership, prioritize and execute. We've prioritized and not prioritized with mixed results in the past and currently. In my personal life I like to imagine that I'm pretty good at it. Without knocking off tasks one at a time I wouldn't have climbed Mt. Everest or been on two Team USA ultra running teams. Point being make a list, in order of priority, and work your way down that list. I really like to see these types of lists, because even if people don't agree, they at least know the priority and can work around that.

Colorado Startup Life: Week 58

October 12 to 19, was a pretty typical week. I feel like we are hitting our groove. People are up to speed and contributing. We're working full blast on the design for our new facility, and it's almost done, the design at least. I'm actually quite happy, this is the most detailed facility design I've ever seen in CAD.

The biggest risk at the moment, in my mind, is validation of our business model. There is a large established company that does what we do, and many companies do what we do internally, but no one does quite exactly what we do. Coming from a large profitable company with a known customer base I worry sometimes that we don't have a customer base. That leads into my next point.

I'm very fortunate. I'm fortunate to have been born in the 1980s and not the 1880s. My electric bill is regularly something like $20 a month. One minute of light in my apartment is so inexpensive I just don't think about it. I don't have to find an oil lamp, find a lighter, make sure the lamp is full, and light it so that I can read after dark. I think light is a proxy for wealth. Being able to have light where I want it when I want it is a luxury that did not exist even 100 years ago, or in all prior humanity. I recently passed an arbitrary financial milestone that by my calculations meant if I quit working today I would have the money to buy food, have a cell phone, and health insurance the rest of my life. Unfortunately, I would really like to live in a a house or apartment and I definitely don't have enough to cover rent or a mortgage, or car expenses, indefinitely. Still, the realization that, if managed well, I will never go hungry is pretty crazy to me.

It's easy for us at every stage of wealth to look up to the next stage and lust after what those more financially fortunate people have. But how often do we look back at where we used to be? Billionaires are starting to really talk about inequality. On a day to day basis they might not have thought about how their standard of living and political power increased so much from when they were an average college student, until the difference between them and us is so large. On a much smaller scale I tell me parents and grand parents they don't need to leave me any inheritance. I don't need it. Spend your money.

The last two paragraphs were really just a long way of saying, I'm totally along for the ride in this startup adventure. If we fail I'm in a better position than many. Probably the two biggest lessons I've learned in the past year are first, sales solves a lot of problems and answers a lot of questions. If you have sales, you have a business. If you don't have sales, you don't really have a business, more of a research project. In other words, while I am an engineer my personal pendulum has swung to the sales side and I would love to sell something that doesn't exist and then spend four years making it exist. (The normal engineer thing is work on a product in your basement for years and then unveil it and wonder why people aren't buying this super cool product.) Secondly, management matters. It makes a huge difference. I thought I had a broad array of managers at my previous large established corporation. As I have learned over the past year, both in person at our company, and vicariously through stories my new coworkers have told of famous managers at other companies, management matters. Now, I'm not saying we need strong authoritarian leaders, I'm still confident that in many circumstances flat hierarchies work, but even in a flat organization there is management of a program.  If a program is not managed, if decisions are not made (which of course is a decision) the program will not progress smoothly.

To be blunt, what I have learned vicariously is that at one company the CEO is the ultimate decision maker and sets the direction. The company delivers, not always on schedule. There is strong clarity about what the goal is, but this CEO often fires people for a single mistake, and often that mistake is more a result of conflicting information than a person's failure to deliver. So there is a culture where people work five years to vest stock and then quit. At a second company the CEO seems to want someone to tell him what the goal is. So they work on this and work on that, interesting projects, but haven't really delivered much for all of the money they have spent. A nice guy, but without a super strong direction. At a third company the CEO is a go getter, but he may very well be willing to burn bridges in an effort to get subset X done, at the expense of the overall program. Entering the startup world has been interesting. I think we have a good management team and good leaders, but it is clear from the rumor mill that not all young companies in our industry are as fortunate.

In short, it's important to think not just about what you are going to deliver, but how you are going to deliver it. What is the balance of culture that gets you where you want to go. It's good to forgive people for mistakes, but at some point you have a draw a line and part ways. It's good to have a strong sense of direction, but it's good to take feedback and pivot too.

Two runs for 6.6 miles, and then Saturday I led the first pitch of the Bastile Crack! Whew it's a fun one!

Colorado Startup Life: Week 57

October 6th to 11th. Life is good. Again, after the personnel drama at work this summer, and the push to qualify and ship a product, we're in a good place. Sure, it would have been nice to be in this place six months ago or a year ago, but we are where we are, and I'll take it. Plus, I'm sure it's been a lot harder for our CEO as he was even more friendly with the people that left, and he raised a series B during that same time.

I spent most of the week working on designing our new facility, which again is not what I expected I would be doing, but it's an interesting diversion, and it will help me understand our testing much better in the future. Plus, we're doing a lot of forward thinking this time around. Our first facility was really the minimum viable facility, and the new one has some room for expansion, and extra safety precautions.

Outside of work I'm going for the occasional three mile continuous run without pain, which is a big step in the right direction for my ankle. I'm also doing some rock climbing and bicycling on warm days. I think I'm ready to build a training schedule for myself and start getting into more formal shape.

Friday I took vacation and drove to Iowa for a wedding. It was 12 hours of driving and I made it a point to never sit for two hours, so I stopped frequently to take little walks to reset my Garmin activity tracker. Saturday morning I went for a run with an old training partner, had coffee with another friend, and took a quick walk on some trails I used to run almost daily. It was a nice little whirlwind tour of Dubuque. Wedding festivities happened in the afternoon and evening and it was great! I am so happy for my friend S who married H! Ever since they met three years ago we could tell there was definitely something there.

It was interesting, my friends of course talked work and how some things change and some things don't at my old company. The grass isn't always greener on the other side, and I like to tell my former coworkers many of the good things about my former company they may not realize, because for most of them it's the only place they have really worked. But to keep the discussion honest, I tell them about the benefits I now have that I did not have before. In other words, at this exact moment, there is no place else I would rather be. There is no company I would rather work at right now. There is no other place I would rather live. The Ozo coffee shop I am in is playing "Let Go" by Frou Frou, I mean, great music too right?

Colorado Startup Life: Week 56

It was a good week. Vacation was a nice break. After all of the rush to ship a product, and the stress of last minute changes, and doubting my place here, I am reenergized and relaxed. Life is good.

As far as work it was pretty typical. That being said I spent a huge amount of time designing facility related things, not our actual products, which to be honest isn't as fun for me as designing a product. But it needs to be done for our expansion and I have skills that make it go faster.

A big highlight of the work week for me was assembling a subassembly I designed for our second product (or product line?) and it went together as planned! I've made so many parts in the past that failed to assemble because either my tolerances and design were bad, or because the parts were not made to tolerance, and this time, with more due diligence ahead of time on the tolerances, everything went together as planned. In other words, what I spent so much time designing appears to work just as intended. I even did a little functional checking, which won't actually be relevant for at least six months and it seemed to work!

Friday night after happy hour at work M and I headed down to southern Colorado and camped at the Blanca trailhead. We arrived at about 11 PM. Then we woke up at 4:30 AM to begin the day.

The Lake Como "road" is pretty terrible. We stopped at 8,500 feet in a Subaru Outback and walked a lot. There are a couple parts of the road where I am not sure any street legal vehicle that can go 75 mph would make it up. We started hiking at 5:07 AM, and went from there. I'm having trouble with my GPS data so I'm not totally sure on the time line for the day otherwise.

We did Little Bear Peak first, including a little stretch of 4th class slab with some ice which made it a little sporty, but the exposure wasn't too bad and there wasn't too much loose rock. We summitted around 10 AM and then began the infamous traverse to Blanca along the 5th class ridge. I got sketched out so we whipped out the harnesses and my 20 meter 8 mm dynamic rope and planned to simulclimb the initial 4th class down climb. I started leading, but I got scared by the snow and ice along the ridge and maybe 150 meters after we started the ridge, we turned around and decided to head down the normal route, and then do the standard route on Blanca and Ellingwood.

We reached the road at 11:55 and then headed up Blanca in the very good weather. The nice thing about months other than June through September is that afternoon weather tends to be better, fewer thunderstorms. We made our way up and around 13,800 feet some rime ice and snow began to cover much of the route. It was cold! Blanca, at 14,345 feet stands noticeably higher than Little Bear and Ellingwood both right at 14,000 feet within a mile. Oh how I wish Colorado had some 15,000 foot tall mountains, or 16,000... or 26,000. We summitted around 2:20 PM, then did the traverse to Ellingwood, summitting around 3:30 or so. Then we headed the long 9 mile back to the car, arriving just 10 minutes after sunset just before 7 PM, making for an almost 14 hour trip car to car. While my watch died after 12 hours, M had just over 20 miles, 52,000 steps for the day, and 8,600 feet of elevation gain, and that includes 3rd and 4th class, a little roped travel and some icy snow. That makes it 44 official 14ers for me! Only 9 official ones remaining. The Wilson group, the Eolus group, Culebra, Pyramid, Capitol, and Snowmass. Not exactly easy ones to get to or to hike. Culebra and Pyramid I'd like to take a crack at this winter, otherwise, it appears they will probably have to wait until next year considering how much snow and ice we encountered this week.

We had Pizza at All-Gon in Fort Garland, and then drove back to Denver, I arrived home about 11:30 PM, took a shower and slept the sweet sleep of night sweats. (After big days it's not uncommon for me to have night sweats, it started in 2014 after the North Coast 24. I figure that my hormones are out of wack after such a demanding day.) I hope you had a good week too!