What’s Love got to do It?
Everything. Because starting a company is a lot like falling in love.
It requires you to be;
incredibly vulnerable
to take extraordinary leaps of faith
AND the chance of heartbreak is high.
Back in the summer 1990 I was preparing to graduate from my MBA program. I wanted to be a commodities trader and I had made it to the final round of interviews with a large firm based in the Midwest. I grew up in Nebraska and knew the difference between soybeans and sorghum – so that environment felt comfortable to me.
And then I got a call from a small software company in Berkeley California asking if I wanted to interview for a marketing job. It was July in Phoenix - 115 degrees – a free trip to Northern California? – absolutely.
So, I headed to Berkeley, and over the first plate of Pad Thai I’d ever eaten, a charismatic entrepreneur named Brian Dougherty convinced me that his company, Geoworks, could beat Microsoft Windows in the operating system game.
He didn’t talk about their 401k program or how many vacation days I’d get. Instead, he shared the love he had for his idea. He was going to democratize the PC, to make it easy for inexperienced computer users like my mom to do desktop publishing.
That I believed him tells you how naïve I was, but it also tells you how convincing he was.
It’s like that moment when you’ve been dating a perfectly good person, someone sensible, someone you can imagine a decent future with – and then out of the blue you meet another person who TOTALLY sweeps you off your feet.
Brian’s passion was infectious. By the time the check arrived, I’d abandoned my future on the trading floor. I wanted to be a part of Brian’s mission to beat Microsoft.
I went back to school all excited, to tell my friends who had landed jobs at places like Goldman Sachs and American Express that I was going to turn down a great job at a well-established company for a start-up that might not be around in two years.
They tried to talk me out of it. They couldn’t understand what was driving me, and I didn’t fully understand it either. Imagine trying to explain to your mother that you’re leaving your reliable, steady boyfriend to run off with the lead singer of a Styx cover band.
Nothing about it was logical.
That’s what happens when you’re in the early stages of a romance, with a person or with an idea. You ride the wave of that feeling - logic be damned.
So I joined Geoworks and got a front row seat to watch a start-up in action. I saw how Brian used his passion to motivate the team, how he got people to give up their personal lives, to stay late and live on bad Chinese food.
We made impossible deadlines.
Passion can push you to step beyond your own fears and limitations.
Brian inspired me to set aside my fear of public speaking and demo PC User groups all over the country, basically stand on a stage in front of hundreds of hard core computer geeks and talk about software. I’m an introvert – the stage is not my natural habitat - but I did it anyway. At every demo I had to face that one guy in the auditorium who had shown up solely to ask a question I couldn’t answer. It was intimidating, but I was determined to do my part.
That experience changed me. I became braver as a result.
What I learned at Geoworks and at various start-up companies over the next ten years was that the road less traveled was the road for me.
I didn’t need a job that was well-defined. Because I had grown up in chaos – something I’m not going to elaborate here, it’s in my book – chaos didn’t bother me. I discovered that I liked the challenge of sorting it out. I could take on new roles and make things happen.
I could bring my bravest self, and once you have been in a relationship that raises you up to a new level, everything else feels like settling.
Stay tuned for more….