The perils of a start-up

I joined Steemit a few weeks ago in response to some professional backlash over a critical post I made on Facebook. It was raw, unfiltered, painted a scary picture of all the difficulties that remain before VR hits mass adoption, and it subsequently got shared more than any other post I have made on the topic.

And it got me in trouble.

Life in a start-up is a constant game of reacting to the biggest new development, pivoting products, business plans, narratives, and anything else that may help you succeed. Some will work, others won't.

Example: Through contacts that we have cultivated for years, our team gained access to a pre-release version of the hottest new headset. We were possibly the only American team to get one, but couldn't brag about that fact because it could inspire jealousy in others who felt they deserved it more.

Access to this new VR headset, and close ties with the product team, meant that we could just barely get content to push for the device's launch, so we pivoted all our art and engineering resources to make a launch title. It has very little to do with our main business narrative, but an opportunity was seen, and seized upon. The game ended up pretty cool given how much time we spent on it, but so far it has earned less money than posting here 3 or 4 times, so I can't call it a success.

Being able to pivot is just about the only way to survive in VR (and AR) these days. You make bets, often extremely fast. Sometimes they pay off, and sometimes they do not.

Every guess, good or bad, becomes your track record, and is used to judge all future decisions. If our pivot to the game had yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, it would have seemed like a genius move. With the crappy sales so far, it looks like a blunder. As the guy who was pushing for the game, my rep is tied to its success, so I look pretty dank right now.

And of all things, now is the time we are doing a major share reorganization as we make room to pull on new co-founders. By being in a slump, I'm getting hammered on the judgment calls that have not paid off, and every failure is used as a justification to claw back more of my shares and erode my control. If I go into too much more detail on that power struggle I will be typing in all caps soon, so I'll finish here with some advice.

Keep a record of your successes. Other people will remember them less than your failures, and when it suits them, they will list the bad and ignore the good. Know your value, and don't let a bad judgment call haunt you. The most generic fortune cookie advice for every founder is to "Fail Fast," learn from the failure, and do better the next time. If you learn something from every failure, and do better the next time, people can't use them as weapons against you.

Or if they try, you'll have your list of successes and everything you learned from your failures, as a weapon to fight back.