Weeks 7–24
Missed a few weeks there… ironically for the exact reason I started this series in the first place. It’s fucking hard. Hard to do and hard to share.
I’d rather miss a few weeks than abandon the project. I think there’s so much pressure to be perfect with things like this–diets, exercise, whatever. The game is long, it’s better to be a bit graceless and persevere than perfect for a bit and bail. This perseverance thing is will be a recurring theme; you have to be alive to win, not perfect.
A quick note, I thought only a handful of people would ever read this and it would be more like a public diary, but to my surprise it was read by quite a few. I was/am really moved by the people who reached out, offered to introduce us to people, and contributed ideas from just the paltry few posts already scribbled. Thank you, and internet ftw.
Founding team
One of the urgent things we were sorting during weeks 7–24 was the founding team. Choosing your team is one of the most important decisions you will ever make as a founder as it is literally upstream of everything. Not only that, it’s difficult if not impossible to reverse, a key parameter of an important decision. It’s also extremely expensive in many dimensions (time, energy, equity) so we thought about it a lot before this, our second rodeo. This process was really, really, really, really hard and not without pain. I’ll write about it more in a future post when we make the team public.
From observation, founders don’t give their own starting equity enough consideration. It’s too easy to just split it evenly, and at first glance this makes sense. Now, I believe this is high-recency thinking. The value of thinking about it is it forces you to be realistic about your role, commitment, and future value. It also presents the first material examination founders have to make collaboratively. A qualifier for making hard calls, if you will. A founder that owns too much equity is a bad thing for everyone. It can place an unnecessary burden on that founder to deliver on stuff they can’t, and mismatch reward to those that add disproportionately more, and this unbalance can persist for years, which sucks.
I also realised that in terms of skills, it’s basically impossible to build the platonically perfect founding team. You’ll always be over- or under-indexing on something. What I realise you can get close to perfect is commitment to common purpose (which is how Joscha Bach defines Love, a definition I love), and a dimension you can’t over-index on enough.
So who is we? There are a couple sensitive details we’re still working though so we can’t go public yet, but I am fucking psyched on this team and already honoured to be working with them.
NB on founding team selection– you can feel it when no time together is enough, and you can literally watch yourself become a better person working with them.
Name
I think coming up with the name of the company is important to do early on, and we stressed it a lot. It gives the company identity, character and feeling which further influences design, language, etc. That identity lives in and with you, in an increasing proportion of your mental life… it needs to be called something.
We had hundreds of ideas for names, and so many ‘almost-the-ones’. Some were good but taken by other companies in the industry which was annoying and sometimes a bit depressing: the shear connectedness of everything in today’s internet brings your staggering lack of uniqueness to bear all the bloody time. But uniqueness of an idea is much less important than what you do with it and this applies to names.
Our for-legal-stuff company name is IKKF. Obvs, it just had to be. The product name is Kinnu. Say hi to Kinnu :)
…Unique word (good for domains and SEO), 2 syllables, easy to say in multiple languages, and sounds a bit like Keanu hehe. Only you guys will get it… the yellow/black pays homage to Bruce Lee (again, only you guys will get it).
In case you’re curious, some names that almost made it were:
Ket (from bra-ket notation)
Firefly (ed company already using it)
Matriks (hmmm)
Learnable (no domain, too obvious)
I’m psyched to continue writing this and in the next instalment, which hopefully won’t be too long from now, I’ll write about the idea evolution, product, and share some screenshots of what we’ve been working on.
Gratitude
I’d like to say thanks to Giles Palmer who was the CEO of Brandwatch when they acquired us and is currently Chief Growth Officer at Cision. Dude is one hell of a persevering motherfucker and I learned a lot about what it means to push through hard times (in multiple domains, at the same time) watching him lead. Thank you.
