Successful Founders Are Insane

I keep this statement taped to the wall in my startup office. It says

"Most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few besides them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.  Paul Graham"

It's funny how true this is. It explains exactly who I am. Mostly I'm insane. If you went through my startup closest you would find quite a few of these types of ideas of mine. To me the vision is never completely clear, yet it's always more clear to me than anyone else.

Find Us At passdownapp.com

The art of taking your idea and getting others to believe in it enough to join you in your insanity quest is like painting the picture for each person individually and the painting never comes out as an exact duplicate. It's leaving my brain at eleven million milliseconds and entering into the others at a much slower rate. They are processing the idea all the while I'm still adding more paint. Sometimes when I tell someone about Passdown, it strikes me and other pieces to the paintings puzzle is revealed. The person I told doesn't know that. Only I do. Shhh

This is where you get the revelers who express joy in your idea, and the scoffers who just cannot grasp the vision. It's a hard place for us treps to be. At least for me it is. In my last post I had asked the startup Gods to send me developers and for the Broncos to win. In seconds the Bronco's won! But I didn't put much hope into finding developers as they are in high demand. They do not need to work for free, on someones insanity vision. Okay there are no startup Gods, but it's a nice thing to believe in. Exactly twenty four hours later I received my second request answered. Woah! maybe they're really are startup Gods?

A very kind developer stated "This is a good idea" and I want to know more about it. He also offered his extensive developing background. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You see I take delight in the person who see's something in the idea of Passdown. The people who do this, fit into the quote above. They see, and realize something is good. And they want to be apart of it.

Sometimes Things That Do Not Make Sense Are The Best.

Honestly I've seen the vision of Passdown about one hundred years into the future. I've seen humanity using it, talking about it, sharing it, in the future. I've pictured many of the problems Passdown will have to overcome. I've invented code algorithms in my head even though I do not code. I've seen what it will do for humanity in it's most precious form. I've overlooked from the balcony at the ones who will get greedy. Yeah, I'm still in the magical aura of Passdown. Yeah, it's still just an idea. But it growing. It's taking roads where schoffers do not walk. It's riding right up the path to the user soul. And the users will say if it's a go. No one else has any say in it, not even my team. 

Yep, it's the road of uncertainty, lined with users. For now they tell us to build, so we will do that.

The Spinning Wheels Of Fastness: A Startups Burst

Now that's almost like what Paul Graham would name one of his essays. "The Spinning Wheels Of Fastness by Paul Graham" I can see it now on his funny, easy to use blog of essays, and his life as an entrepreneur and VC, as well as his former life as the head of Y Combinator.

This is my blog and I get to tell you what the title means. It's that oh so wonderful feeling every successful founder stumbled upon when they finally found the startup that was going to be a success. 

For me, the wheels of fastness are happening now with Passdown. It's like I do one thing hardly creative and it goes BOOM! People react in a way that they never did in my last startup build. I am taken back and shocked by this. I usually have a stunned look on my face while in my mind I process the reaction. 

Hmmmm. What did I say that was so different from my last startup I ponder. To me, I keep expecting people to react the same way as they did my last startup. " Oh, that sounds nice" No one ever was excited about my last startup, but now, it's different.

It seems to be that the spinning wheels of fastness are upon me. I also seem to be landing on every inch of luck that I can. To me, I think, that the startup idea itself takes on some sort of living power. It becomes some monster outside of myself, grabbing up all the life it can, then it returns it to me like a dog who fetched the ball. 

This monster wants me to be happy it's finding the ways to excite people with it's puppy floppy ears and a smile to lure in the disbelievers. 

All the days are spinning fast. The foundation build is quick, swift, and overflowing. Every stone that I needed to find, popped into the build as if, it had been waiting for me for years, ready to claim it's place amongst the bricks.

As a struggling founder of failed startups, I'm am spinning, with my arms stretched out, gathering in all the amazement of this surprise, this build is giving me. It's life all around me, reaching out and grabbing towards the beautiful gift Passdown is going to give humanity. People want it, and that want is leaking into my world, and I am gratefully receiving the response.

Soon I will be telling all of you what Passdown is, and how it will bless your life. To me, I am in the Startup Burst. The place where I have to accept the truth, that I helped build the path to create something great for humans. It's sort of a humbling place to be. And for now, I can only handle little bits of success. 

Reasonably Paranoid: IP Issues For Startups

Intellectual Property

In high school language arts class, there was a poster on the wall that said "Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They Are Not Out To Get You"

I memorized it, as I read it every day for a whole entire school year. I was mystified by it. Perplexed, confused and unsure of it's meaning. Of course I was paranoid in high school, as I smoked pot and took hallucinogenics. I was paranoid every single day. 

As the year went on, the poster seemed to be some sort of personal message to me. Everyday I asked myself why the teacher would have that poster on the wall? What the heck was he trying to teach me? Or tell me? At times, I was sure he knew I smoked pot and he wanted to freak me out! Scare me so much so, that I would stop smoking the now legal drug in my state, Colorado.

Being a startup builder there is this funny thing us founders have to be "reasonably paranoid" about, according to the book Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. It is Intellectual Property. Yeah, that good old thing in our mind called our "Ideas". Now the poster burned into my head says this "Just Because You're Reasonably Paranoid, Doesn't Mean Someone You Had Beers With While Discussing Your Startup Idea, Won't Fuck The Hell Out Of You" down the road, when you get funding and you're building your idea into a preforming company. 

I find this to be one of those funny areas of the startup dilemma. First of all, after you get over your paranoia of sharing "what you think is the greatest idea in the world" because you are so afraid someone will steal it. You go through all kinds of good's and bad's to get to the place where you can only believe in your own idea, when random people sign up for your idea on your website, let alone share it with a friend.

I do not remember who quoted this statement, I read it in one of  Paul Graham's essays, but it said essentially this "You have to shove your idea down their throats to get them to believe it" I found that to be true.

No One Is Going To Steal Your Damn Idea!

Get that in your startup head. The problem is the leeches. They are sort of like internet trolls. This is the person whom you thought was your friend, and you went drinking with and you shared your great idea with, and they put in their helpful friendship info, and said, "Oh yeah that's a cool idea, and you could do this" they contributed what you thought was just a friend helping you shape your idea, but nine months later your baby startup is blossoming into something beautiful and they remembered that drinking night and they looked at their sorry ass life and realized they had no money, and your startup was looking like it was going to have money so they got a lawyer, and they waited until your hard work was ripe and they pounce on you. "You owe them half the company!" the lawsuit says. Gulp, what?

Loophole Leeches

Yep, you don't really have to worry about sharing your idea because no one is going to steal it. Stealing your idea would be a ton of work for someone to build. It's probably one of the least likely things to happen. The problem is someone claiming they were "in on the idea with you" that's the problem. I call these types leeches because they don't want to work. They just want to leech onto all the hard work you did, and claim it's theirs too. These are lazy types in my mind. These are the type who want to find loopholes to suck the benefits they did not earn out of others. Sadly, we have many loopholes in our laws, and leeches and trolls have nothing better to do while sitting around doing nothing, so they look for good companies to suck blood out of. 

Sad really. I think a ton of progress is being done to stop internet trolls and hopefully we also we be able to stop leeches. Because we really ought to have the right to share our ideas with our friends without the fear of them getting all legal on us. : - /  

What Leeches Are In My Life?

After reading about this potential danger that could derail my startup from getting funding in my Venture Deal class I went over all the idea sharing/beer drinking stories in my past and yeah, I have a potential leech. The good thing is the idea I'm chasing now is not the one I shared with this leech. Whew! Still, the worry that some casual friend whom asked what I was up to, and I spilled the beans, could lead to a legal issue in the future is a bit troublesome for my good soul to like. 

I think we will always have to face these type of issues in startup life and in regular life. We just have to live up to our standards of ethics, and not be derailed by the cruelty of others. Sometimes a hard task to do. But us good people just do it, knowing that if we have to carry the bricks for the leeches, we will do it. 

Those Odds Stacked Against Me

Just what are these odds stacked against me? The one that comes to mind first is, NO co-founder. From my research about start ups, I found that single founder companies fail more often then those with two or three co-founders. The reason being is, there is a ton of work to be done and one person can not do it all. That's not to say that single co-founder companies all fail, there are those who succeed, but the odds are really slim.

Number two odd stacked against me is: Not having a good idea. Now this is something to be debated. Of course bad ideas usually burn out quickly. But what about an idea that doesn't look like a good idea? According to Paul Graham, there are plenty of those around. Facebook, Airbnb, Google to name a few. When these ideas were in there infancy who really thought they were good ideas? Only the founders, and some lucky investors. But the founders of these great companies carried on with the task of building their start up, because they could see the idea was a good idea, and they, probably like me, could not get that nagging monkey off their back, they had to keep building them.

Number three odd stacked against me is: No funding. The surest way to sink a company is no money. When someone starts a new business they have to have funding. The tricky part is when you're building this new business you're not usually making any money. So it's all burn rate money in the beginning. Start ups often use their own money, and then money from family and friends. They also spend a ton of TIME seeking funding. We have some new options now with the new laws allowing crowd funding. There is money out there, but who is going to invest in your start up if your idea does not look like a good idea? And you do not have a co-founder?

So there are three big odds stacked against me. Certainly there are lots of tiny odds to add to that list. How am I going to continue on? We'll I like what the swimmer DianaNyad said today, after swimming from Cuba To Florida this past weekend. She said “Find A Way”. That is what I must do. Find a way.