Startup positivity

The last year has undoubtedly been a tough one for startups. And it likely will continue or get worse until it gets better. I’ve always prided myself as someone who is optimistic and always looking at the positives, but this year has taken a bit of a toll on me mentally and my positivity at work has suffered.

I learned pretty early on at my time at Secfi that startup folk would need an overly positive attitude in order to survive. The job is hard and you’re constantly getting sucker punched in the face left and right.

My first few months on the job, we lost a major partner and was unable to continue generating revenue. It was a gut punch and my first immediate thought was that we were fucked. Little did I know that this would be the easiest and smallest of all the crises that we would face in the future.

We ended up taking the opportunity to get things above board and build out the business to scale. We took many months off from generating revenue, and instead focused our attention on improving our product, tightening up from a compliance standpoint, and implementing a lot of process efficiencies.

Something horrible ended up possibly being the best thing for us and put us in the best position to succeed going forward. I’m not sure if we’re in the early stages of this startup crises, the middle, or towards the end, but I need to remind myself that iron sharpens iron in this crazy startup world. Hopefully we’ll be much better coming out of this than we were going in.