So, it has been a long while since I posted and mostly because of all sorts of good excuses that I won’t go into except for one: The Break Up.
VoiceBitz was a team of 3 for the last 10 months and that has now officially been reduced to a team of me. Ok, ok, technically speaking we were a team of 2 and the 3rd co-founder was my wife. The 2nd and 3rd co-founders worked part-time as, well in our family’s case, someone had to bring the bacon home. My wife has now been offered a job after completion of her Ph.D. so we have agreed that her time and contribution in the startup will more or less disappear. BUT her contribution with familial support still means a lot and is invaluable in my quest.
The 2nd co-founder was a friend of friends and friend of my wife in high school and he was, at least what I thought, the missing piece of the puzzle. (If you know anything about VoiceBitz then you know who I am talking about, but I refer to him as an anonymous person because I can). When we first started then I just knew that progress was about to explode! And it did, however, because of the part-time commitment and commitment to his own ventures then this explosion always only came in short and infrequent bursts. Insert sad smiley here. Anyway, long story short, because this is not a post about the last 10 months, we were able to do some good things in the time that we did something, but we never quite did anything great! Insert sad smiley here.
So, this post is about the learning from a break up. Like any break up, oh yeah, I will also say that he broke off his engagement with us, so anyway, like any, or shall I say most, break ups it is hard. For the last few months nothing was really happening and we were not a co-founding team, so the end was coming, but still I tried to hold on to hope that we would turn the corner. I thought a win is what we needed (and it probably would have), but hiding our problems behind something else was not going to be healthy for the startup in the long run. I see that now. I was sad that he did not want to continue anymore and make this thing happen and I felt let down and that he was giving up on me, the idea, and the vision. Well, break ups are hard so sometimes you don’t see clearly, but the bottom line was that we were not making progress as a startup needed to and this was poison. I see that now and thank him for seeing it for what it was and ending it.
I guess what I really learned here was that even though you are getting free help, it is not always good help. Sometimes the same thing you think is helping you is actually dragging you down, but you can’t see it because you hide, or try to hide, it behind something else. I am sad to see him go and be on this journey on my own again, but I am glad that he broke it off because it makes me focus more on the task at hand. And if he didn’t then I probably would still be looking for my next win to make things better instead of making my next win so things look better!