I’ve been debating about whether to write a more personal reflection in the context of Limited by the Unnoticed, a newsletter whose subject matter I’ve wanted to keep focused around history and technology.
But given it’s been a couple of months since my last post, I thought I might recap the last 12 months and use that as a jumpstart into some of the explorations I’m hoping to write about over the year ahead.
Here’s the recap:
A new Matcha
On February 10, 2020, I communicated to the Matcha team that we would need to shift from an inside sales go-to-market motion to product-led growth, and that as a part of that shift, we would have to reduce our team by ~60%.
This was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, and I am grateful to many people at this juncture:
The team that chose to stay at Matcha and keep building
The teammates we were unable to retain
My co-founder and board members
After our reduction in force, we got to work. And then, less than a month later, COVID. On March 16th, we had an all-hands to let everyone know that we would now be working from home. I remember telling people that “hopefully we’d be back in a few weeks, and that we’d play office return by ear.”
The transition to remote was relatively seamless, and I was amazed by the commitment our team showed to retaining connectivity. This video captures some of that spirit:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6646105479468634113/
From March - August, the team transitioned our go-to-market motion and our primary value proposition, developing an entirely new product for Shopify stores called Blog Creator. As we like to say, “blogging builds business.”
A new company
In the Spring, I sat down with Brooks Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Springbot, an Atlanta-based marketing technology company that also serves ecommerce merchants.
Over the next ~6 months, we met every Friday, and by the middle of the summer, we’d introduced our leadership teams to the possibility of combining the two companies. Both teams demonstrated an ability to work well together and a shared belief that we could be stronger together, and by the end of the fall, we joined with Springbot. I’ve written about that here, for those that are interested.
A new person
In the thick of the Matcha transition, the Springbot acquisition, and COVID, my wife Mary Howard became pregnant. Our due date is in April, and we’ve decided that the baby’s sex will be a surprise. For the first two trimesters, the coming reality of fatherhood felt distant and abstract to me. Now, as MH enters the 3rd trimester, it’s beginning to hit home, as the saying goes :-)
I’m excited to take the baby on walks around the neighborhood and ask him/her what to make of the world, and I suspect I’ll discover quite a bit of vicarious wisdom as the baby gets to work processing all the newness and wonder.
MH and I also made a commitment to each other to spend more time running in the mountains and spent a fair amount of time trail running in North Georgia together. North Georgia is expansive, beautiful, rugged, and under appreciated.
A new identity?
As I move into a new opportunity with Springbot, this quote captures well the experience I’ve encountered: “So much of a founder’s identity is wrapped up in their company. When you pour your life into building something, and then you change course, you almost have to redefine yourself.”
And yet there’s something potentially dangerous about this feeling. "You were not your company, and to believe you were and to carry that with you is to stunt your evolution," a friend & mentor recently reminded me.
Being a founder taught me many things about myself and about markets, about people and about cultures. It also helped me understand why I wanted to be a founder in the first place, and why I hope to found another company someday:
Founding is the widest-ranging form of self-expression I know of, encompassing the arts and the sciences, the athletic and the intellectual.
Founding presents the opportunity to establish culture, and good culture has powerful ripple effects across ecosystems and communities.
Founding presents the opportunity to help other people become “unstuck.” Whether that means helping a customer solve a core business challenge, or a user achieve a benefit that had before been invisible. Or whether that means helping a team member build a pivot table, or communicate to a manager, or design their career, or handle a sales objection, and the list goes on and on for miles.
The Future
With recap written, now to the jumpstarting of Limited by the Unnoticed in 2021.
Reading a lot of history throughout the years has led me to believe that history repeats itself, and that the cyclical nature of history is often patterned recognizably across:
scientific breakthroughs
commercialization of technological innovations
rapid creation of wealth and an explosion of innovation
social structures and governmental institutions straining under rapid change
countervailing forces competing with each other to preserve traditions and to expand pluralism
capital flows in search of the next frontier
Admittedly, the cycle described here may represent a view of history that’s too colored by the last 250 years and by being a beneficiary of the industrial revolution, but I find it difficult to refute in the context of the incredible surge in human GDP since 1800.
And yet, roughly 8 billion people have lived and died prior to the birth of the current ~7-8 billion people living today. And most of that lived human experience played out across shorter life-spans with significantly harsher living conditions. It is both dangerous and easy to divorce ourselves from this history.
There is an implicit contradiction in loving both the study of history and the building of technology companies.
History easily leads to believing in the scarcity of resources and to fearing the repetition of our worst instincts.
Building technology companies easily leads to believing that we’re moving into a world of unconstraint and total abundance.
This juxtaposition is hard to make sense of, but fortunately, it plays out in beautifully practical ways on a daily basis. As anyone building a company has encountered, not a minute goes by where Moore’s Law doesn’t coexist with cash balances that must be allocated with a deep respect for the constraints of runway.
Limited by the Unnoticed in 2021
I’ve found myself becoming interested in a number of subject areas, and my goal over the next year is to explore the following in some way, shape, or form.
M&A — case studies of successes and missed opportunities
Fitness — comparisons of coaching, alignment, and traditions across sports teams and software companies
Rails & application perimeters — the software through which software is delivered
Gig & Passion — The corporation of 1 and the explosion of freelance work
The new old home — Home inventory, spatial recognition, and considerations on “stuff"
Infinite vs. Finite games — human communication in the context of intensity
Andy Grove & Gordon McKenzie — management by objectives & orbiting hairballs responsibly
Dev Cycles — relationships between infrastructure and applications
The Knowledge era — synthesizing Albert Wenger’s World after Capital
Eye openers — becoming a dad
Neighborhood experiments — tinkering with organization & logistics that activate neighborhood reciprocity
Fox holes — explorations of collective service models, lessons from the past and applications for the future
10 years of building — random lessons learned from Matcha/Rootsrated and the occasional tear-down of how-we-did-X