Year 3 Startup Learnings

4 September 2022

I incorporated Cellular Longevity, Inc. in October 2019 as a 24 year old first time, solo founder. Last year, I wrote Year 2 Startup Learnings, and the year before that I wrote Year 1 Startup Learnings.

Since then, we’ve grown from 30 to 60ish people, closed two more rounds of financings, and achieved numerous challenging technical feats (and had our faces punched in by biology a couple of times, too!). We are now closer to launching our canine aging drugs than not. We have achieved many of the audacious goals we set almost three years ago, and are making good progress on the many more ahead of us. Needless to say, this past year has brought the best learnings yet.[0]

Here are some of the major themes of the year.

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You must straddle extreme pessimism and extreme optimism

A Founder/CEO must be capable of both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, carefully balanced against each other, the ratio tuned to the needs of the problems ahead of them.

Extreme optimism expresses itself as unwavering self belief, the ability to look at a dense forest and see the path through it, and the ability to focus on the end goal even if the steps are challenging. This is necessary for convincing yourself to start a company and then bringing others (employees and investors) along. Optimism can in many ways “manifest” the future you envision, when paired with great execution.

Great execution is powered by extreme pessimism. Pessimism is key to figure out all the ways you could fail, and hedging them proactively. It’s about running down a problem until you understand every atom. Pessimism allows you to see around corners and grease the wheels of an otherwise creaky train.

Different situations require different ratios of pessimism and optimism.

Burnout isn’t just driven by hours worked - it’s driven by uncertainty

Founders thrive in uncertainty. It therefore took me a long time to realize that, for your team, uncertainty is often the biggest driver of loss of motivation, anxiety, and eventually, burnout.

Your personal uncertainty tolerance is driven by your personality and your position in the organization (proxy for context). The canonical uncertainty-loving executive may struggle with the same level of uncertainty when placed in an organization as a mid-level employee, and equally some individuals are unlikely to be comfortable with uncertainty regardless of their context.

As CEO, I have the most context of anyone at the company, so all uncertainty is fully contextualized for me. An associate-level team member may have 10% of the context I do. Even if you communicate diligently and transparently, variables like fundraising climates, board member dynamics, program prioritization, how decisions are made, personal preferences, etc are always significantly more opaque for team members. I have found that this uncertainty over time can drive anxiety for the team member.

We haven’t fixed this at Loyal yet, and probably won’t be able to until we are a more mature organization. However, a few changes have been well received by the team:

• We defined company North Stars. Every team member’s goals roll up into one of our four North Stars.

• We put together a more rigid goal structure in general, that is open source for the entire team.

• Regular Project Management meetings for each cross-team project.

• We have weekly All Hands where I walk through my logic and decision making strategy.

We’ve always had a generous vacation policy, but the biggest improvement has been facilitating concurrent (whole-team) vacations. This avoids the deluge of work when you return from vacation. We turn every federal three-day holiday into four days and take two weeks off over Christmas/New Years.[1]

Figure out what excellence in executive leadership looks like

At Loyal, we have found success in both hiring in experienced executives, and developing our executives internally. One team member has grown from a Project Manager to a Vice President, which has been both a great career opportunity for them and incredibly rewarding for me to give another person this opportunity.

We recently brought on extremely experienced executives - those who have seen companies one to two orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than Loyal execute. It has been transformational for our organization.

At this stage of the company, balancing internally developed executives with external executives has allowed us to benefit from the pros of both and hedge the cons of relying too much on one model over the other.

The other key consideration is the stage of your company. You probably don’t want a fancy executive for your ten person startup.

Building an excellent executive team, and being ruthless in ensuring they are the right fit personally and professionally, has paid dividends at Loyal. Personally, it’s allowed me to refocus on the areas I am 10-100X at, instead of running around from problem to problem like a chaotic chicken. If I did it again, I would have started building this team when we were 20 people, instead of waiting until we were over 50 people.

Thanks to TSB for editing this, and to the Loyal team for making this past year the most fun yet.

[0] I think that every year

[1] We don’t currently have customers (pre-revenue) - this vacation structure may not work once we have Pet Parents and vets we need to support.

[2] Your investors will both quote this stat at you, and then get pissed when you fire new executives. It’ll be very annoying.