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Working for a startup company is a bag of mixed emotions. We are very disciplined and roll out of bed early, fire up the espresso machine and Mac computers, check our to-do lists and start working. We don’t have a minimum wage set at our company. In fact, our wage scale seems to prefer the far left side for now. We don’t have an office and work on different continents and time zones. We are not complaining, because this is what we want to do. We follow our dream and aspiration.
Venture Capitalists talk about the runway of a startup. The length of the runway is the time you have to take your business off the ground before running out of cash. Well, we are off the ground and flying, but keep a weary eye on our radar for bad weather and our GPS for direction. We think our business is well defined, our product is doing well and has a great purpose: building and protecting wealth for you. We can build wealth over time by making you co-owners of successful companies. We have a dream that many people, all over the world, will get involved. This would be great in so many ways.
Back to earth…! This morning, I read the post-mortems of 75 startups, which have failed miserably in one way or another. All of them worked extremely hard to succeed, had great ideas, burned all their savings and investment capital and are gone. It’s very sobering. Nobody will hear about them. There are no survivors; the mortality rate for failure is 100%. There are so many ways to fail and only one way to succeed. I remind myself to learn from their mistakes, build our company brick for brick or in our case binary for binary and focus on one client at a time.
Our biggest challenge is to be on your mind before you think about work, career, a house with a mortgage, a sunny vacation, a new car, dinner at that hip place, your cousin who made a lot of money trading art, etc. Investing time to figure all the above comes natural. Why not do the same with investing? We, as human beings, are not well wired to think long-term. Short-term desires always seem to grab our thoughts’ headlines and the rest is for later. But ask any wise person, older than 70, if life has passed faster than anticipated, if long-term is really short and if it would have made sense to start investing early. 70 years = 613,607 hours. Please, use one of these hours to think about building and protecting wealth and don’t wait too long!
You see, in the end, we are all like startups. Most of us start with little assets. We have mixed emotions and battle between short-term and long-term desires, reality and goals. It’s all very normal. It’s life. We love to build and grow but focus on the now and worry later. However, don’t forget that one thing is for sure: the long-term will visit you shortly. Startup now!