The cycle of life within a startup

We had a blast last week with nearly the entire US Secfi team in the office. It was evident that everyone sorely misses colleagues and work events like these. We’re hoping to do this once a quarter and hopefully do a larger trip with the broader European team once a year.

I caught up on a lot of rest over the weekend finally. I got two rounds of golf in with my Saturday round being some of the best all around I’ve played and Sunday being one of the worst outings I’ve had. Golf will do that to you. One day everything seems to be working and you’re thinking you're going low the next day, and of course it all comes apart.

I’ve written a lot about how much we’ve grown over the last few months. One thing that is inevitable with startup growth is that people will start to have their roles narrowed. The earliest employees of a startup will need to be like Swiss Army Knives in which they can do a little bit of everything. As we grow, we start hiring more and more steak knives. Roles and responsibilities get spread out amongst other employees and early employees will have to give up a lot of tasks.

This can be a sensitive subject as early employees have taken a lot of pride in building their team/product. It’s not easy giving up the thing you’ve spent so many hours building. Seeing your successor run it her or his way as well can also be tough. But this is part of the growth path and it’s necessary for the company to continue to grow. There comes a time for everyone to move on and we need to put aside our own egos and let our new hires bring in their own thoughts and ideas to help grow the company.

You build, you grow and then you move on to the next task. That’s the startup cycle of life.

As for myself, I’ve been experiencing this a lot as I look to transition my team and role to someone we hired to take over. It hasn’t been easy, but I know it’s what best for the company. The beauty behind these transitions is that it opens up the door for new opportunities within the company as well. My new found time post transition will be spent working on new strategic projects that I am excited about.

It’ll be a new era for me starting Q4, but I am just as excited as I was since I joined.