Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Being an Entrepreneur!

Titles Mean Nothing. You Will Be a Janitor

Hey there Mr. CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder! As a co-founder of a < 10 person company with a product that doesn't have customers, titles really don't mean much. Everyone will be doing a little bit of everything, including cleaning the toilets. Don't try to mask the grind of being an entrepreneur with some superficial title. In reality, you should love and embrace the nitty gritty of those first days. Business cards are nice to hand out, but they really shouldn't say more than co-founder or something else. Maybe someone inside the company plays more of the CEO role (speaking and being the face of the company), but that doesn't really matter in the early days. You have to be humble and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. You don't have a staff of 50 to throw the task on to either. If you don't do it, it won't get done. Sure you could also try to optimize for efficiency, but that's almost counter productive as the early days of a startup requiring doing so much, that it's hard to just cut something out.