Year 1 Startup Learnings

Oct 27, 2020

I incorporated Celevity in October 2019. Since then, we’ve gone from a deck and a provisional patent to a team of 12+, a lead drug, and a head brimming with new knowledge and experiences. These are some of my biggest learnings in the last year.

Small decisions compound exponentially, especially around team & culture

One of the most important things I ever did for our culture was a mistake. The week before a key proof-of-concept study, I decided to completely rework the study design and re-question all of our assumptions. This delayed our timelines and made most of our previous work moot. It also saved the study.

That was a show not tell moment with our values - it showed the team that truth seeking is the most important thing, and no one has to be scared to tell me if they want to change up something last minute (because I did it myself!). This paved the way to many other close saves.

For key relationships, make sure motivations are aligned

From investors and advisors to contractors and employees, taking time to understand to fully empathize with their priorities and worries, and not automatically assuming that their motivations are the same as yours, was a hard lesson to embody. As a stereotypical bombastic founder, it was hard for me to comprehend someone not being mission-motivated and not wanting this in the world as badly as I do.

In hiring, I’ve found that even the most talented person will not perform well if they don’t deeply and truly care about your mission (at least at this stage of the company). In professional relationships, it’s unlikely their motivation is the same as yours, but often motivations can be complimentary. Everything is so much easier when they are.

Most catchy startup advice has layers of nuance and conditionals that you wont realize until you’re in the thick of it

I hit this one a lot this year, a likely consequence from listening to a few too many startup podcasts. A good example is ‘hire fast, fire fast’. Generally good advice, in my opinion. But no one tells you how difficult it is to execute on that advice, the accusations you’ll face from the person or others, the emotional toll of making a decision that affects someone’s wellbeing, and the ripple effects a firing, even if necessary, can have on the team and how to deal with that. Correct advice? Totally. But far from the full picture. One of my biggest learnings this year was becoming aware of and starting to learn how to predict the nuance and conditionals around things that seem simple from the outside.

The line between optimism and naïveté is a wide as a hair

To do novel hard things requires optimism that you have some key insight or ability that means you can achieve what others haven’t. You need to be optimistic to trudge through the sludge and to recruit others to your crazy idea long before it’s proven. Naive optimism is so important for building a company and telling a story. But you also need to be paranoid and see around corners.

Balancing these is difficult - too optimistic and you’ll fall into a trap, too paranoid and you’ll never make a decision. Over the last year, I’ve gained a healthy respect for the challenges ahead of us, moving my natural tendency of optimism a few inches closer to paranoia. I think this will serve us well on this next stage of our journey.

For me, the hardest part of this was realizing that the optimal balance between optimism and realism differs depending on the situation; what works when facing investors doesn’t work when recruiting, and these two situations differ significantly to the balance you need to hold internally.