On July 2nd, 2012, I stopped being an entrepreneur. It’s been sort of a silent transition, but it happened nonetheless. Threeplicate, the startup I cofounded, is still there, but on its way to oblivion. We’ve ceased all operations and evaluating how to handle liquidation and all related (boring, time-consuming, expensive and I’d say painful) activities.
Some ten days ago an acquaintance of mine told me “You’re an entrepreneur at heart”. That got me thinking.
Am I?
Not now, not today. I suppose I’m just one of the many would-be entrepreneurs. I have 2.5 years of actual experience behind me, which is still something, so I’ve learned tons of stuff, but I still know nothing.
The cruel fact I understand now is that I’m fighting more now that I’m just an employee. I’m learning more, and more quickly. The reasons are different of course (just to name one, trying to bend company culture and steer it in a slightly different direction) but there are many aspects in common to a startup (constrained resources, fast release cycles, quickly changing requirements and goals).
The thing that hurts the most in my case is seeing that the company I work for would need the service we offered, and proposing to adopt a competing solution. I guess that tells something about my professional integrity, but you can’t even imagine how hard that is.
I miss the freedom I had. I miss living at the frontline. I had a lot of fun. Going back, I would do it again without thinking twice. Sometimes, however, I feel like I downgraded my career. Like I’m doing something less worthy. Truth is, from both an economic and responsibility point of view, I’ve upgraded my position. Still… there are moments when I feel like I don’t exactly belong to this world and I ask myself “What am I doing here?”.
I now work for a medium company in the web/cloud hosting space, 100% Italian, with 3-soon-to-be-6 datacenters across Europe. Despite I strongly disagree with how certain things are done, it’s nothing to laugh at. The project I work on is impressive and the investment the company is undertaking is in the several million Euros range. The isolated environments we use for development cost around 100k Euros. It’s very cool.
Am I happy about it all? I think so. It’s just different and it takes a while to get used to it all.
Oh, and I still have to write a post-mortem on Threeplicate.
Comments
One response to “Still Fighting – For Different Reasons”
Nothing in life is a downgrade… its all about experiences and learning from them. I very much doubt that we have seen the last of Dario Solera “Entrepreneur”