Going through the bootstrap process on our company has brought back memories of starting day at my first startup.
It was back in '96. Not everyone was doing or had been in a startup before so it felt really new. I remember being surprised that we wouldn't be working in a garage or a basement. And that there'd be a 401(k) and health plan. I thought it was supposed to be tough?
Though I signed on before the Series A closed I wasn't to start until it did close. That felt like a looooonnngg wait. Probably about 4 weeks in reality.
The great memory that I have of that time was reporting for the first day of work, which was the first day there was office space. Walked into the office space, and there was - nothing. No cubicles. No chairs. No desks. No computers. A big empty room. (Cool! This WAS going to be a startup after all!)
Our VP of engineering brought in donuts that morning along with some chairs and a whiteboard and we were off and running... By the end of the first week we had cubes, desks, chairs, and some plans.
There's nothing like the feeling of starting from a blank slate. I'm on the 4th time with that feeling and it never gets old. There's also an excitement to getting by with less while you help get everything in place. In my second startup my personal laptop running Windows 98 served as our corporate Internet gateway using dialup while we waited for our T1 install!
The first three times there were network devices to install, desks to help put together, and of course fundamental early decisions to make sitting or standing around a whiteboard.
This time that's all replaced pretty much with services to provision in the cloud. No office space, so no office network. Email and collaboration via Google. Product deployment on servers in far off data centers.
One thing remains the same though. That great feeling of the fresh start. Balancing priorities and trade-offs and trying to maximize the value of what you're going to build.
Very addictive - I highly recommend it.
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