Building a Rocket

Tonight, I feel 24.

Curled up in a hotel room in Shen Zhen, soaking up the alone time when my colleagues are out scavenging for dinner, I feel too young. Too young to be powering through on a Saturday night, trying to figure out what is the bottleneck in our implementation process (and realize that maybe I'm the biggest bottleneck of all). Too inexperienced to be leading a metastasizing team with people all older than me and be somebody's boss's boss. Too weak to really do all the things I scribble down in my journal.

I'm not burned out. Because that was this summer. This time is different - I still keep moving. Meeting after meeting. Email after email. Weekend after weekend. I am slowing down though and it's painful and shameful to hear the screechiness of my own engine.

Maybe I'm just tired. But I can't sleep at night because I keep hearing our app background music play on a loop, taunting me, accusing me of sleeping so early.

We used to joke around and say that when we sign up company X, then we know we've got it made. Well, on our trip to America last month, we did just that. This is the deal that starts the snowball rolling, the momentum that will push us to the tipping point and to profitability. This is the beginning of the future of our startup.

But nobody ever tells you that the tipping point is scary as hell.

I feel like we're building a rocket after it's already left the launchpad, hoping we will not run out of fuel, find out our astronaut is crappy, or realize that the market actually wants a submarine. And somehow, somewhere, somebody thinks that I can be trusted to figure out how to build several rockets at the same time. 

To do list tomorrow: Change that background music.