There is a moment of despair in the life of most startups. It comes after the TechCrunch articles are old news, the excitement of launch and funding have worn off, but the company hasn’t found product-market fit. Paul Graham, the legendary founder of Y Combinator calls this the “Trough of Sorrow.” In that Trough of Sorrow, entrepreneurs are laboring in obscurity with no sense of whether they will ever figure out the right ingredients to make the company work.
Jorgeson and Caldwell were in that place for years. Jorgeson believes that these moments bring you back to the purpose of the project. He says, “When things get hard, that's where you realize why you're doing what you're doing. That’s the most important thing. From there, it's all about just how you how you stay focused, how you weather it, and how you react to the highs and the lows.”
In many ways, the Trough of Sorrow is sorrowful due to perspective. If an entrepreneur is looking at the company’s progress through a macro lens, yes, it looks like the company is at a standstill. But in the Trough of Sorrow, it’s better to look at the micro progress that is being made on a daily basis.
During their years of route-finding on the Dawn Wall, there were weeks where they were toiling away on a really challenging pitch without making noticeable progress. They would spend all day trying and failing to link up the necessary moves to complete the pitch. Their fingers were bloodied, and their bodies were spent. Maybe they made a little bit of progress that day compared to last week, or maybe not. Then they’d clip their belay devices on the rope and zip down back down to the ground. When their feet hit the ground and they unclipped that blazing hot belay device, stepped out of their harnesses, removed their helmets and switched on their headlamps to hike down to the valley floor. Once they hit the ground, they had a ritual.
Jorgeson notes, “In a lot of ways, the most important part was the time we spent together from when our feet hit the ground to when we got back to the meadow. On that hike down, we would really talk through everything that actually went well that day. Despite all of the struggle, we were trying our best to deliberately call out whatever little bit of progress was made-even if it was incredibly small that day. Taking time to recognize success in the micro is so important. From the macro, every year, the climbing community is watching us go back to the climb. And the question is always, ‘Have they done it yet?’ When you're the one in the trenches, the macro doesn't really matter. Success in the micro is all that matters. Focusing on success in the micro allowed us to enjoy that Trough of Sorrow.”
Негізгі бет Kevin Jorgeson - Laboring in Obscurity
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