Sticks and Mushrooms of a Startup

A massive windstorm swept in and blew all day long. I know when the wind blows, my neighbors tree drops a million little tiny sticks on the ground in his yard and my yard. 

When the storm was over I gave it a look, grabbed my trash can, rake, and broom, and went to work. I raked and swept for an hour and got all the excess shedding of the big sick tree picked up. 

Then I went to work on the mushrooms growing. Picking them out of the grass was easy compared to raking a ton of little sticks. 

Finally done, I sat down and looked at the people passing by. One young, beautiful woman was walking with her mountain bike with the front tire lifted up into the air. She was pushing the bike only on the back tire and the front of the bike facing the sky. I thought I should help her, she must have a flat I thought, then a young man came about 50 feet behind her with his stunt bike and he too was not riding it, he was walking with it. Both tires on the ground he walked by and the sunset caught him between the two trees and his silhouette was golden. He was young with a character about him that could have been a picture on the cover of a million dollar rap album. WOW, I should have ran after him and paid him to pose for just a moment. My opportunity walked by in 3 seconds. Next time, I'm chasing those opportunities down. Don't let it go, cause if you see it you have to capture it.

There I was with a pile of sticks and mushrooms.

Thinking about the one thing that I think about almost constantly in my mind, startups, ideas, creating something out of nothing, life, people. Then I thought, yeah startups are like sticks and mushrooms. We grow like a fungus and only a few of us will make it. The rest of us will become brittle sticks that fall to our death and are swept up and tossed into a Dumpster, where almost no one will know how much work we did to build something that failed. 

Our dreams of success will be swept into oblivion by the wind current. Our startup will become something we don't really want to talk about, cause we will be talking about the next one, the current one, "The One" yeah that's the one we will focus on when the the other one gets tossed.

Mushrooms and sticks, fungus growth is fast, and sticks, well it takes a long time to make them. If you build a startup of fungus, you may think it's all fast growth and so super awesome, but fungus rots and sticks are really just branches that yearn to find the way to the light. The branches don't die as fast as a fungus. Branches may shed sticks, but those sticks are just the pieces of your startup puzzle you don't need any longer. 

As pretty as shrooms are, grow branches and shed sticks. That's what a startup really is. Yeah, it's fast growing, but not as fast as you or VC's, and Angels think it should be. Yet growing a solid branch is the stability a company needs. Mushrooms will only give you a false sense of making it. Sticks will give you lasting growth.