Dancing in the darkness,
Your deepest desires …
Do you know why you’re here?
Do you think you have control?— Lexicon Avenue, Why R U Here?
What a week. What a month.
Hard to believe I’m back on the fast track in the Silicon Valley startup scene. Shipping! Hiring! Organizational issues! Interpersonal conflicts! Planning! Strategy! A third of my team is in Singapore, and if events had gone as planned I would have been there instead of at The Atrium last night. Alas, when I went to check in for my flight, they noticed that my passport expires in September — and Singapore (like many other countries these days) requires documents to be valid for at least six months. Sigh.
Control is an illusion.
Influence, however, is possible.— dialog with Alayne Reesberg, 2004
But instead, after stressful times and long hours working down in the Bay Area, it was great to get back to Seattle Thursday night. After a relaxing Saturday I was soooooo ready to dance. And talk about perfect timing: a six-hour DJ Anomaly set at The Dark Before the Dawn at the Atrium! Yay!!!!!!
The west coast psytrance scene seems to be doing pretty well these days. I’ve been working so much that we’ve missed a lot of great shows, but I’ve still managed to see Cortex at Synchronize, Logic Bomb at Pulse, Full Power Friday at Retox. The Atrium’s smaller than any of those clubs, but it’s a lot more comfy, with two great chill areas and tasty food and drinks till late. DJ Anomaly had a lot of new tracks, and the vibe was great. By the time cinnamon rolls magically appeared at 4:30, we were both feeling happy and relaxed.
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jon | 12-May-12 at 11:15 pm | Permalink
Supermoon
Chaotic, but certainly not haphazard…
The update mail I sent out on Friday started with “It’s crunch time.” Yeah, really! Two of the teams in my organization have just shipped major deliverables, and all three of them are working aggressively on their next releases.
And I’m still trying to figure out how best to set up my schedule to spend time phoning and skyping with people from the core and customer engineering teams in Singapore. A fifteen-hour time difference is awkward; and while over time I’m sure there’s a way to sustainably balance time with them in the evenings with overly-packed days in California, some experimentation will be required.
Life in the startup fast lane!
So once again by the time Saturday night came around I was more than ready to dance. And DJ Anomaly once again obliged, with a 4+ hour set at Supermoon at the Atrium.
It took a while for me to decompress, with work thoughts still roaming around in my mind to some extent. Fortunately I was in a great mood, and the propulsive music suited it perfectly. By the end of the night, after meditating by candlelight, I was once again much more relaxed.
I heart psytrance.
It’s something we talked about a lot before taking my new job, and we came up with a lot of reasons. The last two years at Intrinsa were great but very stressful; my time at Microsoft took it to the nth degree. Since then I’ve done a lot of work to reduce stress and it’s really been paying off: happier, sleeping better, spending more good times with friends and family. Now an amazing opportunity falls into my lap. How to keep from backsliding?
And make no mistake, startups are inherently stressful. This is a tough time, getting started with key deliverables in progress. The team is still jelling and understaffed, there’s so much on our plate that there’s not enough time to think, and we’re all learning how to work together effectively. Ah well, it comes with the territory.
But so far at least it seems under control. Personally, I’m a lot more reflective, nowhere near as overly-harsh on myself as I used to be, and have learned a lot of skills: much improved intuitions about time frames, for example, and far better at coaching, mentoring, setting expectations, and diplomacy than I used to be. I’m getting a decent amount of exercise and thanks to the Atrium and the resurgent SF psytrance scene, plenty of relaxation almost every week. As an added bonus I’ve got some great people working for me — I like all of my direct reports and our skills and backgrounds are very complimentary, more so than any team I’ve lead in the past.
So there there’s a lot of encouraging reasons to think it will be different this time.
We shall see …