tell the story of your signature challenge and your (meta) superpower

In a young organization, especially one that is growing fast, it’s easy for the founder’s story of what this place is and how it got here to get lost. Breakneck growth compressed years of experience into quarters. The team doubles in size, then doubles again, then doubles again. People who have only been here for ~6 months think of themselves as seasoned veterans and they’re not totally wrong - maybe the median tenure of their colleagues is 3 months.

We all carry around some measure of a healthy, default desire for stability and status. Often someone you’ve hired in a period of volatile change will do great work in that period, and then immediately pin hopes on that being the Last Time We Have To Do Stuff Like This. If the hectic beginning of their time is the peak of the chaos, they enjoy the double benefit of a) a much more sane and predictable work situation moving forward and b) bragging rights about their “wartime” service, back in the old days.

As a founder, you may need to repeat yourself, a lot. It might be with the same dumb slide you use in every single all hands presentation. That slide could contain a single sentence; it could be a chart or a few bullets from your breathless history. The point of it is to remind your people - thriving in the face of change is what got us here. It’s our signature. It’s what we’ll need, maybe even more, in the 6 or 12 or 18 months to come. As hard as that change is, I’m not going to complain about it. And you shouldn’t either. Because our uniquely badass approach to change is why we get to do this rad thing we do. 

-eric