Ignacio Chechile - The Fighting Startup Quick Guide

The Fighting Startup QuickGuide

IgnacioChechile

Copyright 2021 IgnacioChechile

All rightsreserved.

Table of Contents

Intro

This will be brief. Mainly, becauseI dont have time to write it. I am part of a seed stage startup,which is supposed to ship a product soon. Now, some good and badnews for you. I am not your typical author, so please lower yourexpectations. I am not a guru, I am not even remotely wealthy, I amnot popular: last time I checked I had 20 followers on Twitter, anddecreasing. If anything, the value of this book lies in the factthese lines come from a place which is, I assume, not thatdifferent from the place you currently are at the moment. I do nothave any magical advice, nor a recipe to get your startup out ofthe rabbit hole it is in, which I feel is what brought you here inthe first place. Recipes are only for cooking, either mac andcheese or meth. There are no saviors. Your startup will get out ofthe hole only by your and your teams ingenuity, perseverance andfundamentally cohesion. Or it wont.

. If thathappens, call The Vatican, or an exorcist.

Instead of waiting for a miracle,maybe take a quick look at these chapters, you may find something.The clock is ticking, I can hear it, you can hear it. So I willkeep it brief so we can go back to work and sell stuff. In themeantime, avoid the dilettantes who write from their offices at IvyLeague business schools those nice looking 700-page books about howto run a startup. They dont know; they speak from comfort, whichwe lack. Avoid the troubled young millionaire with an existentialcrisis who writes about how he made millions and losteverything being reckless, but is still awfully rich. Avoidthe best-selling guru who puts his face on the cover of his bookabout leadership, hand in chin. Stay away from all that bullshit.Sounds good, doesnt work. At least I am being honest here: I haveno clue what Im doing in my startup, but Im trying. Im in thearena. I have tried some things that worked, and some others whichdidnt. Ive learned a thing or two in the journey, which by theway is far from being over.

I thought it would be more adequateto publish all this from foresight, before knowing if my startupwill ever make it or not. This book is called The Fighting Startup so I figured I should be genuinely fighting, otherwise it wouldbe like a war correspondent reporting from a spa. Too many thingsare written from hindsight. Not this one.

If my startup will succeed, theselines will become a validated set of things to consider whilerunning a company. If it wont, youll see this as a paper trail ofthe hill I chose to die on. These lines happen to emerge while theuncertainty is at its peak, when comfort is zero. When we arediscovering the product. When we are actively searching forcustomers.

Every chapter in this book aims tobe a sort of reminder. An earworm, playing in your brain at alltimes. Or a gadfly, buzzing. Thats what I aim for. To pick yourbrain. I hope you will end up hating me because you just cannotstop remembering the things I am telling you to mind in theincoming pages.

By the way, I am a technical guy. Ihave been doing software and systems for a long time. Things whichcan cause trouble if they dont work. I currently wear a CTO hat inthe startup I am in. Hence, the tone of the text revolves around aCTO-esque perspective: product design, complexity, decision making,engineering. It does not dive deep (or at all) into fundraising,business models, or financials. I believe that good engineeringbegets money. Or, begets consistent money. Smoke and mirrors canget you by for a while, but not forever.

Last but not least, you are probablywondering how I got myself into this situation. Before being inthis mess, I was a VP in a larger company. You know, a manager. Iwas comfortable. I was respected, I used to enjoy the cushy job.For a while. Until I felt an itch: I was building nothing: I wasjust talking, and talking, and talking. So I did what I tend to doin general: dynamite what I have painstakingly achieved withpatience, time and passion, and move on, pursuing an amorphousidea, seeking to get my hands in the dirt again. I have no sunkcosts. Nor do you, I reckon. I believe we are in this game to bringorder in the chaos. We love the chase, we are bored with theconquest. We are here to create things that work whenever we turnthem on, and keep on working, and working.

May the chaos eventually becomeorder, or we will perish in the process. Off we go.

Mind Going All TheWay

When I was maybe 5 years old, I was ready toleave behind the training wheels of my bike. I remember I was in LaLucila del Mar (~350km south of Buenos Aires) where me and myfamily would go for summer holidays. I vividly recall the thrill ofthinking about riding the bike like older kids did, but I also doremember the frustration after falling and getting hurt whiletrying to do it, although I was trying quite carefully. Things werenot working great, so my grandpa warned me: youre going too slow,youll keep on falling unless you gain more speed. His advicesounded a bit strange to me, like, opposite to what I wouldvethought. As if my careful approach was actually part of theproblem. So, given that I hadnt achieved much with my own ways, Idecided to give it a go so I went higher up the hill I waspracticing on. I can't say it worked out the first time (andfalling at higher speeds was not precisely amusing), but I couldsee that the higher velocity made things somehow better, so I feltit was worth risking more. It took me a few extra bruises until Ifigured it out; I still remember the joy when I finally nailedit.

Many things work in a similar way:they need an initial buildup to overcome a stalled or disaggregatedstate and sustain operation, which also comes with some risksattached. Airplanes would only generate enough lift to sustainflight provided enough thrust can ensure a proper speed. Thinkabout how stars form in the sky. As the Galaxy is filled withclouds of gas (huge aggregations of cold hydrogen), gravity pullsdense regions into collapse, which the cloud resists until it isunable and begins to contract. As it collapses due to itsself-gravity, it compresses the gas further, causing it to heat up.Eventually most of the matter accumulates at the center, and thecentral sphere, now a protostar, continues to contract and heat. Asits temperature rises, more and more of its hydrogen ionizes, thatis, the atom loses its single electron. Free electrons scatter andabsorb photons, so the more electrons that are liberated, the moreopaque the protostar becomes. If photons cannot escape from thegas, their energy is trapped within the protostar, causing thetemperature to rise even further. If the temperature within thecore rises to a sufficient level, it ignites nuclear fusion whichprovides the pressure required to prevent further collapse. A newstar is born. Notice all the things that must take place for a starto exist. Too many, right? Too unlikely? Not quite. As FreddieMercury sings: look up to the skies and see. Billions of stars. Thepower of scale. Think about this when trying to get into a crowdedmarket. There can always be a new star, but you must come up withsomething truly stellar.

The startup journey is like tryingto leave the training wheels of the bike. Intuitively, one wants toplay it safe, but at the same time you know the only way to makethings ignite is to climb higher up the hill and let your body gainkinetic energy while keeping eyes wide open on the road ahead. Andif you fall (and you will fall), you shake off the (star)dust andtry again until you leave the place riding like a boss, and shininglike a star.

As Charles Bukowski wrote inFactotum (1975):

If youre going to try,go all the way. Otherwise, dont even start.

Mind Persistence and Moderation

Nordic countries are admired aroundthe world. According to a broad range of indicators, the Nordicsrank at the top of international comparisons measuring, among otherfactors, happiness, gender parity, income distribution, humanfreedom and press freedom. Other countries look up to the Nordicnations to find out the reasons for this. Without pretending to doany sociologically deep analysis here on the reasons why theNordics do so good compared to others, at least everyday life in anordic country has given me a reasonably good perspective on howsome nordic cultural concepts are, perhaps not the sole explanationof all this, but surely great contributors.