The next perspective

Every 12-18 months, my role at Blackthorn changes along with my mindset. With more people, more customers, more revenue, and more initiatives, I've had to mature faster than I naturally would have. In the last two weeks, we sponsored three events in two countries that I had no clue about, with a team I haven't met, and events I hadn't heard of. This spawned a moment of reflection.

I no longer granularly know what's happening across the business. I used to know every deal, support ticket, product doc, Jira ticket, lead, employee, and candidate. Now I don't know every 'any' of these, so its become important to run the company how I think it'd be run and the rest of the company adopts the ethos. I'm also focusing on hiring people who know far more than I do in their respective areas. Generally speaking, I'm hiring for and leading by: respect for everyone, timely responses, thorough engagement, humility, ownership, and to have fun doing what you enjoy doing.

Reflections...

WHAT I LIKE: A person can only focus on one thing, and my focus has led me to the UX and tech sides of building our apps (Product and Engineering). I keep tabs on what's happening with the rest of the business, but I'm in the weeds with the software. I end up managing each department by metrics but I lose much of the day to day. Even at our still-relatively small scale, it's too hard to keep up on all that's going on across the 110 people we now have (such as having no idea when and where we'll be sponsoring events).

TRUST: I have so much trust in our Revenue team that they have free reign to do whatever they want to. Stuart Croft, Brett Waters, and Megan Reddy are leading the charge and doing great. WeWork's slogan was (is?) 'Do What You Love'. We had a WeWork office early-on for a few of us and I guess it stuck with me. I only focus on the part of the business that inspires me to give it my all for years, the other areas are for people who enjoy them the same as I do.

CULTURE: The people in these pictures look happy and are just smashing it. It's a weird feeling to think of all the things that did and didn't happen that led the people at Blackthorn to work here. If I never got into Salesforce work, got fired from Silverline to start what is now Plative, decided to make a Payments app, given up in 2018 when we almost went bankrupt...it's a super long list of what ifs, everyone would be on different journeys today. To think if any of them hadn't happened, all I'm seeing now would be different.

Of course this applies to anything and anyone in life, but the more customers, employees, events, and interactions we have that are a part of Blackthorn, the more it's awe inspiring for me to look back and still not know what to think. It's an emotion I haven't pinned down yet. I'd love for the team to carry this on as they go forward, to see how they feel today and look back in a few years and see all that it becomes.

SMALL ADDITIONS COMPOUND: It's a strange and humbling feeling to see this all grow. I rarely leave my apartment or even walk more than a few blocks for business purposes and I don't often change out of sweatpants during work hours. I've worked on our apps from my apartment for years, working with people from around the world who were also doing the same thing.

For years during all waking hours through the weekend, I was creating fields and objects in Salesforce, writing Jira tickets, tweaking the website or AppExchange listings, messaging people on LinkedIn, updating screen shots, and chatting with the team. It's strange how it has led to 600+ organizations across the globe paying many thousands of dollars for the applications, providing them operational value, supported by our team in 15+ countries. I never thought the effort would all add up.

SERIOUSNESS: From time to time, I've had to get serious when dealing with issues that affect the teams' personal lives. These include asking people to work later hours during occasional times and adjusting salaries and bonuses during cash ups and downs. My words now take on a different meaning since I don't know everyone personally. Newer teammates don't know me well enough to understand me, and thus I'm likely viewed with less context. My messaging needs to be concise, repeated often, and 'professional' (whatever that means, but you know it when you see it) while keeping my personality.

STABILITY: Employees and people in general don't like instability. As a younger, startup-oriented team, changing priorities often was okay-ish, but now, the people who join later stage companies, view this leadership as a company without stability, without a plan, without a process. This continues to be a hard change for me since it's not how my mind works. Even though I've turned down most travel, go to sleep early every night, do multiple therapy sessions a week, and exercise daily to stabilize my mind, it still often doesn't translate to stable thoughts. Most of my thoughts get absorbed by key leaders on the team before reaching the greater audience, which helps me immensely.

POPULAR: I've done nothing materially differently in my output at Blackthorn, yet over time, I've continuously received more attention from people I don't know. I'm speaking at Nathan Latka 's SaaSOpen conference next week, I've been on ~8 podcasts, I get asked to speak to other founders at least once a week for advice, 2-3 investors per week to write us a check, 4-5 cold email outreaches a day, and 3-4 on LinkedIn. While it's flattering, it's also exhausting. I finally now understand why more 'popular' people don't respond to all the outreach. I used to look negatively upon them, but now I get it. The volume is just too much.

I've resorted to writing an FAQ on our company founding, pushing people there who have questions and also asking them to email questions instead of taking meetings. It's so many people asking for help that if I don't turn them down, I don't have enough time to meet with our internal team.

I remember Stewart Butterfield talking about this phenomenon when he first saw an ad in a newspaper about Slack without his team previously telling him they'd run it, and at that point he knew they reached some degree of scale. We're not a Slack, but the sentiment feels the same.

The Blackthorn.io team is just doing so well and I'm finally quite removed from the overall execution. It's just pretty awesome to reflect and watch. Stuart asked me yesterday, "Imagine if you completely stepped away for 6 months, what do you think the business is going to look like?". The answer is that it would continue to grow without me, which means our team is awesome. I'd like to think that I help it to go faster, but perhaps I'm just kidding myself 🤷

I finally have time to take up some other interests, which I never knew I had, such as reading sci-fi, writing and painting, as well as more time with my wife and cats. Perhaps this is what my life will look more like after Blackthorn. So many founders start other business software companies. There's more to life than more software and I intend to find more of the fulfillment...