Oh the Highs, and the Lows...

Well, the lows anyway. The highs are few and far between for the start-up maven. There are pleasant euphoric moments when something works. And others when some high-falutin' VC will return your call, (before quickly backing away at any sign of risk). There are moments of supreme satisfaction when you face a barrier, hammer away at it for a week, then see it crumble before you.

But the lows, oh the lows. Slaving away with no support, for months on end. You just KNOW there are a dozen big technical barriers still ahead, and two dozen people who are going to lethargically block your path in sluggish disinterest, flippant lack of vision for anything ever being different or better. The dwindling savings are great too. Knowing you're forgoing a six-figure income while you burn cash in spite of your penny-pinching ways.

Then with all that weighing on you, up comes the next technical barrier. You know you can get through it, but you also know that it will involve many hours of slogging. What once was stuff you'd assign to a junior employee, and support them along, now you have to do yourself. It's a hard row to hoe, when you know your skills are better used elsewhere.

But perseverance is the key to success in entrepreneurship. If you can look at what you've done and be sure that you are taking a pragmatic approach to the product and a real market opportunity, you know there must be a path through the challenges.

Having been in 'the industry' for a couple or so decades, the most frustrating thing is seeing that projects and products I defined for other companies but which couldn't find traction among those who wouldn't buy in to the vision, emerge 10 years later as a brilliant new product from some other firm. Oh, the foregone first mover advantages. Oh the many ground-breaking advances lost to history but for the handful of people who saw the demo. For each one of those things, there's some former executive dope who probably tells people "Huh, we had a plan for that ten years ago, but we killed it."

But I'll take responsibility for all that failure myself. For each or any of those things that failed due to big corporate reticence and lack of vision, I should have persevered to the point of taking the design to customers in an end-run around the vision-less multi-layered marketing echelons, packaged up the design and requested ownership for external spin-out, or perhaps just blatantly stolen the design and launched on my own, and settled later if anyone noticed. But I didn't, so I'll bear that burden myself, and grumble about what could have been.

Researchinator struggles along....