So much have changed since my last article. First of all this journey was never meant to be stable and smooth so this was kind of expected anyways.
In the very beginning the problem of equity was never explicitly brought up to my other co-founder until it was too late and I started having questions so I kind of pushed. However I am glad I pushed her because she was clearly hiding something from the rest of us which I identified as fear.
And honestly, the book Never Split the Difference came handy at that time. Since it taught me some useful way of helping the other party identify the worst fear and say it out. I did this with the other founder/CEO, and she began talking instead of hiding. Hiding information, as I have predicted, is a response of fear.
I am glad to be able to push her, so that at least I have practiced what I have learned from the book. Now I didn’t really get her to agree on what I think is fair, yet. But I am also not sure if I should continue trying or not, because I have seen how she didn’t really response to other people on our team who said something that is basically creating a hostile environment for the minority and women. Yet the fact no one spoke up made me very disappointed and highly doubt if this team is actually capable of creating a female friendly product.
Anyhow. It’s impossible for me to give up my full time job since I really need some stable income as well as continuous visa sponsorship, so figuring out what she really wanted is to convince me to join them full time also serve as useful information. By pushing her although it looks like it’s my loss since I basically cannot be part of this unless I join full time, but at least I got the very useful information that full time or not matters so much to her and to the VCs, so it helped me to recognize I should probably stop being part of her team since there is nowhere in the future I will be able to join them full time.
However I do not think this necessary means I have to stop my journey of starting a company. Except this time I will be a little bit better than the last time since I have grown and gained some confidence of playing with the empathy tricks. 🥰
On the other hand, I do realize I really hated this whole team except the founder herself who is also my college best friend. I have stayed because of her, but it is probably time to move on. Why? Cuz money is not everything. If I have to endure a toxic work place, what is the point? Even if I become a billion through this company with them, I will probably grow lumps all over my breasts by the time we become successful. I have worked hard and played smart to earn myself a very rare positive and non toxic friendly work environment. And if working for a startup feels more like crap than working for my old company then it really just completely loses the point of wanting to crate a company at the first place.
And this push also helped her as well, which honestly is what makes me feel the greatest! She had always wanted to ask people to join full time, but was too afraid to even do the slightest push because we have not gotten any fund for a few months already. However I have also taught her that she can also use empathy as a key to get people to talk about their concerns and see if that opens doors for opportunities, for possible information and a pathway to get them to work full time for her. And after talking to some group members she immediately got 2 full time employees, one of them being a really smart person from Stanford & worked on Meta’s algorithms before. She thanked me a lot for this thorough conversation, for that I had supported her and had been telling her nothing would change our friendship and she can talk all her fear to me. And it works! It benefited both her and me. 😌 I think this is another proof that empathy and transparent, open communication are always keys to the successs.
That is to say, I also think now I have learned a lot even from this very basic stage startup experience! And I have talked a lot, thought a lot and observed a lot. For example now i deeply believe the only key to any company’s success would be on having empathy and open, transparent communication and healthy work culture and anything that makes you doubt them are wrong. I also think this will be my strength. I will believe in them unshakably because I actually used lots of logic deductions, read many psychology papers and books, and some although probably not too many business cases, and I realized these are the core or essentials. Many people doubt them and make stupid decisions that got customers pissed off. This would never be me.
Speaking of unique strength, one thing I really wanted to figure out is:
What is my unique strength as a founder? Or as a teammate? What would make people think highly of me and want to work with me or invest in me?
I started realizing that assuming I would grow out of ADHD and fixed all my executive functioning problems are probably daydreams. What’s more realistic is what the books had been telling us all the time — to utilize other people’s strength to fix your weakness and use your strength to provide what others lack instead.
My strength comes from Diffuse Thinking and I know it. Not only because I have an ADHD brain and I actually did contribute a lot of more creative ideas to the brainstorming we have in Medium Rare, I really had the best of my ideas during these diffuse thinking time only! Like when I was showering etc. this is something unique, because the rest of the team’s ideas were somewhat always less creative and I have noticed this pattern.
Another strength is something I didn’t realize until getting compliments from different people on the same area. The word they used is “adoption”. I adopt to the changes as fast as a 🪳 . This was my friend’s joke but there were many different friends who said the same. They admired how strong I mentally am and I always adopt my mindset to be in a state that I will not lose all my shits even after crazy pressure and completely unfamiliar environments.
I am also very resourceful or you can say simply “knows how to use a search engine properly” or whatever. But I am not ashamed of saying this too is a skill that I am super proud of. Without educated parents I literally had to learn so much stuff by myself. Being resourceful means I am actually utilize the internet to fill the gap between me and someone who got educated parents to teach them all that shit. Take one step further, I also think chatGPT is an opportunity for someone like me to thrive — as along as I learn how to use them efficiently just like how I figured out by myself how to use google efficiently. With the help of AI I should be able to make an MVP quickly and much easier. 😼
My tech lead’s 1 on 1 meetings inspired me a lot. Even though we were talking about seemingly unrelated events like having to move home and label essentials/basic to make your life easier to breaking down PR into smaller chunks.
The ability to break down the difficult problem into smaller actionable items. So small and actionable that they don’t feel difficult to achieve at all.
These similar quotes were also repeated in the YouTube video I watched that night, on the topic of changing and building up a new behavior.
Have you noticed a pattern?
At least I have. I realize there are universal truths that can help explain each other and they exist in different, seemingly unrelated worlds but they hold the same core logic. I believe as I have the ability to identify the most essential piece or an overall state of a very complex situation. Just like any other ADHD I am bad with details so execution is always going to be a problem and structure too (just look at how I structured this diary🤡). So instead of focusing on this weakness and whine about it, I should use my strength and ask other people or even AI to cover the part I cannot do.
