Chessboard Chaos!

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A Bit of Startup Support

Tariffs, Canada, Market drops, What's App War Plans, and Government layoffs. It’s been a wild and crazy few weeks.

A couple of friends who work in EdTech have shared how rough the past two months have been, as funding for Universities has become uncertain. Employment offers have been recinded, and everyone is preparing for the worst.

These last few weeks have felt like the first few months of the pandemic in 2020.

My last startup (RIP Meenta) entered 2020 with three hard-scrabble founders and ended 2021 with a fantastic team of 40. It was a wild ride. We grew so fast that we needed a company retreat to keep everyone in sync and working as a growing team.

The uncertainty of the pandemic was our opening.

Extreme uncertainties can feel like (for a startup) we are playing chess, and someone (the pandemic or the President) has kicked the chessboard.

Kicked it very hard.

All the pieces have gone flying.

It felt that way in the spring of 2020, too!

You are a founder. You are making the new norm. You are not an incumbent, so don't stress like an incumbent. You are not a victim.

Having the chess pieces in flux is a massive opportunity—an opening.

Incumbents will waste a lot of energy trying to fit things back into their old positions on the chessboard. They will make things sound terrible. Startups will not. When the rhetoric builds up and the recession predictions become ubiquitous, founders have an advantage.

Your clients have new problems. You are the solution!

I hope this helps some founders dig in.

Newsletter v2 Coming Soon.

I have been working on this newsletter for two months and planning it for over twelve. It was a natural byproduct of twenty years of working in various startups.

Newsletters should follow best practices, such as a regular cadence and a set format.

I have ignored these two recommendations.

In the spirit of fail-fast, I launched this newsletter knowing that I did not know what I was doing and needed to experiment and let the process show the way. This is a standard founder model. Don’t overthink or overplan. Experiment and learn fast.

That’s changing now.

This will be the last open format. Next week, the format will be more structured. I have enough feedback from founders, vendors, and readers to offer v2 next week. I'm a bit nervous.

Newsletter Recommendations

Thanks to everyone in my network who shared their go-to newsletters. I count my network as one of my strengths. Early in my startup career, a former business partner sat me down and stressed the value of not going into DIY mode when I had a challenge.

His insight was to go to your network as early as possible.

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