Hello world

When you’re running a startup, you learn a ton of, mostly painful, lessons.

For good or for bad, there’s often an impetus to share them.

Maybe it’s because misery loves company, or a philanthropic drive to help others not walk into the same plate glass windows you have. Either way, I found myself driven to share these hard earned lessons.

But then there’s the fact that you’re running a startup.

There are about 1000 more pressing priorities, and so blogging feels like a dereliction of time resources. Like you’d be letting down your team, customers, investors etc. Let alone the mixed incentives of making the story about yourself versus the company: a lot of founder blogging comes off as the lead singer expropriating spotlight from the band. I’ve often remarked that a marked rise in founder blogging frequency is probably not a great sign about the underlying business.

For all of these reasons you have two impulses in tension.

So for these past years I’ve been keeping a list of these thoughts, lessons, larval posts. Housed in a Google Doc, bulleted out, in my back pocket waiting for when I could trot them out.

Well, in that TalentBin was recently acquired by Monster, now feels like that time.

And while our energies are still 100% focused on scaling TalentBin across Monster’s vaunted sales organization, the added leverage provides the opportunity to maybe take things from an 11 to, say, a 9 and a half.

So my plan, in addition to losing the Founder Forty, is the take this opportunity to share some of these lessons in hopes that it can help other founders and would be founders be more successful, faster, and ideally with a little less pain. I’m sure it’ll be fun.

This blog is for Mike.