Man today just plain sucked... I spent most of the day Fire Fighting
7am: Woke up grinding my teeth: I do this when I'm stressed...apparently my jaw knew the type of day I was about to have.
8am: Ann calls me from India to say we still don't have an office (three seperate deals fell apart due to the hot market in Bangalore). She stayed an extra week but now we need her back here to help with Demo.... so she is headed back.
9am: Got ready to leave for office - couldn't find keys to my car 15 min later had to take Vijay's mini-van to work... whoo hoo
10am: Azhar, Burak, and I had set 10am to finally do a full walkthrough of the product. The build didn't work yet. I am getting very anxious to have a working build (geek talk for working version) with only 7 days to go before Demo'06. Azhar says, "Don't worry it just looks worse than it is ... it is almost there. " I say okay but it looks bad...;-) As I breadth through my nose trying to stay calm... when I was a 25 year old CEO of Andale I would have gone non-linear... now I know Azhar and Burak were moving things as best as they could... I make a joke... we all laugh... a nervous laugh. We review what has to happen by when to get this out. Working build by tomm, all bugs out by Wed, etc....
1pm: Tara and I are supposed to have the photos to use for the demo finalized and the script - we don't ... I lien on Tara to get it done ... she says dude I understood the urgency in your first sentence... leave me alone so I can get it done..... I pause... we end the meeting...;-)
1:30pm: Northwest calls on my cell phone saying they are about to cancel our plane reservations because Ann booked them and they needed by authorization as the holder. I handle it.
1:45pm: Baris put in the wrong address and isn't going to get paid tomorrow. Ann is in transit to London so I handle it.
1:55pm: I find out Trinet our (PEO) payroll provider didn't make two other changes that Ann and I had asked them to make. Between this and all the immigration issues we've had, their service needs work.
2:00pm: The power fails in the server room at the office. With 36 machines all running at full power (from Danny's compute grid) we blew the power in the office. The building technician came in and Azhar and I were laughing because we knew once he saw the server room which feels like an oven he would scream at us for all of the heat and power we were drawing. He was pretty cool.... but we need to get our compute grid to a data center (our main production site is already at a proper facility). This was planned but now we have to fix it.
3pm: I call our data center vendor for additional space. He says he has only 1 rack left at 3x the original price and only on a 1 year contract (we are currently month to month). He turns me on to another.
3:30pm: I have lunch with Tanvir - our new Engineering architect. He and I talk about how he screens candidates and his focus on their core "language skills" (programming language that is). Tanvir has a good hiring process. I was impressed.
4pm: I finally get an hour to review the press release that Shel drafted over the weekend. Got that done. Day is looking better....
5pm: I learn a candidate we made an offer to doesn't accept. My read is basically he doesn't have the risk profile for a startup. This was a concern for us, but we thought he might get over it. It still sucks as we need to get moving on others.
7pm: I finally sit down to focus on my stuff for the release. If tomorrow we have a working build and Drago's new stuff is in we will be in good shape.
A bad day for a CEO of a startup is not when things are going bad... it is only when fires distract you from focusing on what is important. I once heard that Bill Gates had an alarm in his office and every hour it went off. When it did he asked himself, is what I'm doing right now the most important thing I could be doing to move the business forward. I don't know if this story is really true, but if that alarm went off today each hour - the answer would have been no. That is why today was a bad day.
Right now for Riya the only thing that matters is launching a Beta that people love. Everything else, office space, hiring (yes even hiring), etc... just has to wait. Tomorrow if I can focus on going through every page with Azhar and Burak it will be a good day.
My alarm just went off and I need to hop...;-)
Hey Munjal,
The last few lines of your write up reminded of something a senior entrepreneur-cum-VC told me a few days ago - A CEO (be it of startup or established business) is always faced with the 'urgent' and the 'important'. And the way things work is that he has only so much time that he can tend to only the 'urgent'... and the 'important' almost always gets side-lined.
- Rachna
Posted by: rachna | January 30, 2006 at 09:26 PM
Hi Munjal,
Looks like the fun just began...
Good luck with ur demo...did I hear someone grinding their teeth while sleeping ;-)
-Madhu
Posted by: Madhu | January 30, 2006 at 09:56 PM
Hey,
No worries, keep up the hard work. You were just featured in Pcworld, and I'm sure the beta will be great. Site is slick too.
Posted by: Roger | February 07, 2006 at 02:27 PM