The song Roads from Portishead is one of my favorite songs while driving. The bass in combination with the sound of the road leads to some kind of Doppler Effect and it sounds like a heart beating. Today I listened to the song while running and I started thinking what the song is actually about. My interpretation is that the song is about somebody in great misery – maybe because he is not understood or has no direction– but nobody listens and helps. Still he is on the road of life and has to move on. It is like running on a road and you know there are still 6 km coming until you are back home.
Being on the Road of starting up a company feels sometimes that way. You have a great idea and tell it to everybody, but nobody listens or understands what you are talking about. But nevertheless you keep on running towards your goal: Regardless of what they say!
We’ve got a war to fight! The first two years of a StartUp feel in many ways like a fight. A fight with yourself, a fight with the investors a fight with the people you are working with and also a fight with your first customers. You push yourself everyday to your limits and beyond them. It exhausting emotionally and physically. But you have always your dream in mind and that keeps you running. My point of view is that your dream should never be about just only money. There needs to be something higher from an ethical or moral point of view. But still, money is so important in that world to so many people that it would be funny to think that money would not be a powerful tool to change the world to a better place. It is by far not the most important one, there are other things – emotional things – that are way more powerful like love, hate, friendship and family. My opinion is, that the only reason why Venture Capital is so important for StartUps is to get rid of the fact that money is important and thereby the StartUp-Team is able to just focus on their emotions in creating something new.
And surely that ain’t right – how many times do you hear from people that things you do are not right or you should do it in another way. Everybody is there to give a “good” advice. How can it feel, this wrong? This question comes a lot to my mind. If it feels right, how can it be wrong? Sometimes we are not in the position to define whether it is right or wrong what we do, because there is a code of society. Nevertheless I think leading a StartUp to success means sometimes to do things that are out of the norm. It is not like the end always justifies all means, but if you do not bend social constraints sometimes you will say in the end: we never found our way!
– fabscriptor –
fabscriptor 