Handling external factors as an high-tech entrepreneur

This is a rambling personal entry, and may not be hugely interesting to a lot of you…

Building a company is a lot of hard work.  There’s lots of great input out there from experienced entrepreneurs like Eric Reis, Dave McClure, Sean Ellis… basically all the folks on my Startup Helpers google reader list.  And there’s a lot of great insight to be gained on the Venture process nowadays, from the blogging VCs - the must read list of VC bloggers is here.  But it’s still about working hard, working smart and being resilient.

I don’t write this entry as a way of saying look at me haven’t I had it tough - I want to make the point that EVERY startup entrepreneur has their challenges outside of the job.  Part of what makes you a successful entrepreneur is dealing with them.



We had some tough times with my first child.  My son has special needs.  Indeed, until we got the autism diagnosis and were able to start a program that managed those issues as he got to an age where there’s no over-spill of problems into the work arena, it was pretty hard to juggle family and work life.  We moved to Texas to be near my wife’s family, which meant walking away from Silicon Valley for a few years - that was very difficult on a persona level.  And I’ll write another time about building a startup in Houston, flipping it to a UK company and seeing almost none of the expected cash ever hit my bank account.  (Rough experience, but taught me to not exit too early - this time round it’s swing for the fences time!)

Some of you might have noticed I stopped blogging for a while.  This was largely because of my mother - damn parents, eh, who’d have ‘em?  But, I do feel very fortunate that I was doing a new startup this fall.

My parents moved in with my and my wife and children about a year ago - not the usual old & retired thing, my dad still has a very active job - primarily to help with the kids and in particular Ethan, who needs a much higher level of engagement than most other children his age.  Because of the flexibility of doing a startup, I was working from home one day last fall when I came across my mother virtually collapsed and vomiting blood everywhere (and I mean everywhere).  Had I not been there she probably wouldn’t have made it through the day.  I say this because after rushing her to ER it turned out she had a softball sized stomach tumor that ruptured.

Cancer = suboptimal

Miraculously it went about as well as is possible for that kind of surgery (thanks ECH).  But in the follow up they found a tumor in her brain - completely unrelated.  So, they left that in through Christmas, and January operated to remove the brain tumor.  Mum’s recovered well from that this last month, though isn’t a huge fan of her US Marine Corps hair style (I think she looks great).

Cancer twice = worse

However, this left me without the support for the kiddoes as well as having to help take care of mum for a while.  But that’s just the sort of thing life throws at you.  If you’re going to put your startup on hold for these things you’ll never get it done.  Me?  Well I stopped blogging, stopped going to non-essential networking events and focused on product building, customer service and prepping for investment.  The team picked up any slack and we got through the period.

The other reason I mention all of this is to remind entrepreneurs that it’s the sort of thing that your team will go through too - you may have plain sailing, but your engineer could be juggling family situations, visa issues, all sorts of things.  Be cognizant of this fact and help them work through it.  You have time to build your startup.  Don’t snatch at things.  Prioritize.  Bounce back.

And don’t bitch about it.  We all have these tough times.  You won’t hear of most of them.  If you’re an entrepreneur you’ll find a way.