Ejovi Nuwere

This month is the one year anniversery of SecurityLab. They say 9 our of 10 companies fail within the first year. We’ve beat that one. But more then 50 percent of the companies that make it out of the first year fail within five year, so we still have a long way to go. I’ve learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes. Hopefully my first year experiences will be helpful to others who want to start their own company. I’ll try to post about my experiences over the course of this month.

Not all that sexy:
Running a startup is sexy to everyone but the person actually running things. People looking from the outside in only see the end product, the branding, the marketing. But they have no idea what’s going on inside and how mundane tasks rule, even in a startup. Fifty percent of my time is spent doing things I have no interest in doing, like preparing taxes, signing and writing contracts, preparing collatorial, managing employees, dealing with the bank, managing cashflow. I thought I could just write code and get other people to manage that stuff. But it doesn’t work that way.

For example, at the recent VON conference, my marketing person couldn’t make it at the last minute because of personal reasons. I found myself managing the booth half of the conference when I really wanted to attend the conference and listen to the talks. Running a company the buck stops at you. That means doing a lot of things you normally wouldn’t want to, but have to do. In the end manning the booth was a good experience because I managed to perfect our pitch a little more, but it was still frustrating. Unless you sell out to VC’s earlier on and allow them to build the company and hire a management team you will be doing a lot of very boring things.

Would I avoid these annoyances in the future? Despite my displeasure in doing them, no. These things can be annoying but dealing with banks for example, or managing a trade show booth is valuable hands on experience. Inefficient but valuable. I think I would now be able to deal with most of these task a lot more effectively if I needed to start another company. I’d still dread it, but atleast now I know I can do it and thats a great feeling.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 4:21 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.