Hi @rajaraman - thanks for the question and to you and the team for hosting me today.
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There definitely is a tension between internal ambitions and putting that into action in the real world!
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My ambition to create a company I wanted to work in was shaped, in a large part, by my experiences of working in toxic environments in the past
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Those experiences helped me understand what I didn’t want
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They also helped me develop a positive picture of what I wanted this business to be, the parts I cared most deeply about were, and remain:
a) Interesting and important problem domain that I felt strongly about
b) Working with people I respect in a collegiate way on a shared goal
c) Work:life balance - my kids were aged 3 and 1 when I started -
It’s easy to idealise the future but, as we all know, building something from nothing is often brutally hard
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I realised very early on that Geckoboard could easily take 24 hours/day, 7 days/week if I allowed it…
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And that it was going to be a long term project
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I soon found that I had to define my priorities more explicitly to avoid burning out or being overwhelmed
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The process of explicitly stating, and living, my priorities with discipline were the best antidotes to being caught up in whirlwind
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I don’t think I could have survived 10 years doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t drawn those lines in the sand
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It also helped that I discussed this during interviews from a very early stage, which helps candidates to select in or out of that
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Once you reach a critical mass of people who want the same things, it starts to get a lot easier
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This has since been codified in our company values and has shaped a culture that persists ten years later
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Which is not to say that it doesn’t still require active monitoring, but now there are many eyes on the problem, not just mine