5 Lessons for 5 Years at Aggregate Intellect

Today is aggregate intellect's 5th birthday!

So, today is the 5th anniversary of incorporating aggregate intellect! This is a big milestone for me since it is officially my second longest affiliation (second to my PhD institute, University of Toronto). And I should say, it’s absolutely mental that it’s been 5 YEARS!

So, here my 5 lessons for 5 years:

1. Instead of building a startup, build a product: I’ll admit, at the very beginning I was mostly just excited by the lure of being a startup founder and my perceived status that it brought. I thought I needed that to be enough. I thought that was what needed to happen for me to feel happy. But very quickly I learned that I needed to have a concrete product or offering that people understand and find valuable.

2. Instead of building a product, build a company: I did identify as a product person when I started though. So, that mental shift wasn’t too hard. I thought I knew what it meant to build a product. I had done that at my corporate job previously. But, boy, that was different to do in the wild and with no safety net. The most important thing about it was that it’s not just about the product but all the company that needs to sit around that product to be successful. Like the people who do the things that create and distribute the product. That came with so much complexity but that’s what needed to be done.

3. Instead of building a company, build a business: This one was probably the hardest one. As a technical founder I had significant impostor syndrome to act like a business person. I still do. Like lots of it. But being faced with the financial realities of a company, I quickly learned that if I’m not thinking about what I’m doing as a business then I can’t do all the other fun parts like being a startup founder and building a product. 

4. Instead of building any business, build a sustainable business: This was probably the most painful one. Of course, as someone who was just learning how to navigate the world of business, I didn't quite understand all the different nuances. I was learning all about different business models, go to market strategies, financial modeling, selling, etc etc. But I was doing all this with a fundamentally wrong assumption: investor money will come in and will solve all my problems. Guess what? I raised a couple of angel rounds but those didn’t solve my problems. Up to this point, I didn’t take making money as a bottomline seriously because I was just chasing what I thought investors wanted. So, I had to get into a bad financial situation to learn that investors weren’t going to save my business. So, I started doing work that was a reasonable compromise between fun and making money: advisory and implementation services. This was also inspired by the idea that I wanted to do something where even if I fail, I would do so safely and gracefully, rather than in burning ashes with very long term consequences.

5. Instead of building a sustainable business, focus on being a healthy founder: The biggest inflection point of this journey, however, is that I have learned that there are so many things that are outside of my control: how / when customers respond; global pandemics; global financial crises; market meltdowns; who stays in my team and who leaves. So, anyone who tells me they can predict what will come up and act accordingly can kindly go and #$#%$^$%. What I have control over though is how much resilience and endurance I have in dealing with all these storms! For that the only thing that I can and should prioritize is my health. Specifically my cognitive, mental, physical, social, and financial health. Almost everything else like building a sustainable business, building a valuable product, and being a cool startup founder would naturally come out of this. Cognitive to make good decisions, mental to stay level headed, physical to manage my energy, social to get support when I need it, and financial because, let’s be honest, nothing puts you in a corner like financial volatility. 

I’m not sure if this is useful to you or not, but there you have it! Now you know your grandma was right all this time!