🛣 Defining the direction by only seeing what you leave behind

For those of you who are not familiar with rowing, take a look at the cover picture again. The crew in a rowing boat is facing against the direction they are moving in. The majority of people think there is always someone holding a steering wheel seeing where the boat goes, but truth is the majority of boat classes do not have a so called coxswain. In fact at Olympics the Eight is the only boat class with a coxswain, all the others race towards the finish line without ever seeing the finish line before crossing. The only way to make sure the crew is not heading into the lane of the competitor is to see the buoys that were left behind and make sure the trail left by the boat in the water is as centred between the buoys as possible. To take it further, when rowing on a lake only landmarks can be used to stay oriented. Sometimes the person sitting at the bow seat has to turn around and make sure nothing is coming in the way. Sitting in a rowing boat knowing that I don’t see the direction I am heading into has become the most natural thing for me. 

On the journey of starting a company the unknowns of where we are heading into feel not yet natural at all. At the beginning, when joining EF I did not even know who the co-founder will be, then whether this team is going to hold or break up quickly again. After coming up with a joint belief and hunch we did not know if any of our thoughts hold true. When we started customer exploration we tried to be as vague as possible with our product idea and only explore their problems and needs without having a clear tangible product idea. Now we do have a more tangible product idea but whether we can prove product market fit with it is unknown. Potentially we will pivot and change our direction. But we cannot slow down just because we cannot clearly see the way ahead. We need to go full speed, learn from what we leave behind and then correct our direction whenever necessary. Even though I am aware of this, the biggest mental challenge for me is to also be comfortable with the unknowns.

💥 F*ck ups are inevitable

When moving at high speed into a direction you cannot see, the chances of hitting into something are pretty high. As a rower I crashed into swimming tree trunks, other boats, stand up paddlers, etc. Were these crashes my fault? Not all of them, but definitely a significant number of them. Did I cause some costly damages? Boats are made out of special carbon fibre and I destroyed material worth thousands of euros. Was it painful? Most of the time I got away with just a bit of a shock, but my back has also hit metal rigs of other boats at pretty high speed already. Have I ever thought about quitting and giving up my dreams because of the risk of crashing? Never. Such f*ck ups happen to every rower and even though everyone tries to avoid them as good as possible they are part of the game. 

As startup founders we know that we are going to hit walls. In fact that is part of the learning curve. In weeks 5 and 6 of the EF program we were trying to navigate the direction with a lot of different feedback and input coming from various different people. It felt like various people standing on the riverbank trying to make us aware of what we have to do to not hit another boat. While everyone is having good intentions of helping us too much different input can also be confusing and in our case made us overthink and we slowed down to not hit a wall. We agreed to speed up again and if we hit a wall we hit it. Might be painful. Might be costly. But is definitely not going to make us give up.

👂📢 Trust and communication are vital

As said in a rowing boat without a coxswain the only person who turns around from time to time is the so-called bow(wo)man. Turning to see the water in front is bad for boat balance and speed, thus one tries to not turn around every other stroke. The person at bow seat tries to get a very good overview of the next couple hundred meters quickly to see if anything could potentially cross the boat’s way. Nobody else in the boat turns around. Either the bow(wo)man sees the issue or nobody does. It requires literally blind trust that (s)he is having everything under control. What is more, very clear communication in the boat is vital. On the one hand to make sure nobody gets nervous about any obstacles, on the other hand because in case of necessary changes to the direction (or in the worst case to stop the boat) the whole crew needs to act fast and together. If there is confusion in the crew the obstacle is going to be hit and damage caused.

In a founding team with different skills and responsibilities we also have to trust each other and communicate well to make sure we are on the same page. Amine is focusing right now on everything technical and I try to get potential customers to speak to us. It is important that we both are on the same page of where we are right now, what the trail is we have left behind and what we believe the direction is we should chase next. We operate in sprints organised in tasks and have regular check-ins every week to update each other in a structured way. And on top of that we of course also speak ad-hoc daily. The number one activity we do is to inspect and react. If we stop doing it confusion arises and if the inspection is wrong, we will f*ck up, shrug it off and the next day is a day to kick ass again.

PS: the bowman (person on the very right) is me 👋 , 10 years ago in the Austrian junior quad 😎. I believe we never hit anything serious in that crew 🤞.

What you do in the dark is what puts you into the light ✨

Every sport has a pre-season time at some point during the year. In rowing the cold winter months when ice is covering our beloved water is pre-season. During these months we spend endless hours on the rowing machine and in the weight lifting room. Athletes see their own progress, how they get faster, stronger and more enduring. This preparation time is crucial for success during the season as it builds the physical fundament. However there is one big unknown during that time, no matter how fast or strong they become, they don’t know how that compares to all the other rowers until the season starts. 

In the first weeks at EF, my co-founder Amine and I did research around application performance monitoring and observability in web3, started customer exploration and gathered data points to test our initial hypotheses. We were able to build up a first fundament of what the market needs are and our startup idea might look like. However, it was hard to get more insights from a wider audience without becoming more tangible. We somehow had to get out of our training room and out on the water where we could face the overall market.

Hitting the road 🚌

Have you ever wondered how rowing teams move around a country or even continent to compete at regattas? The whole team has to get the boats ready for transportation, an action called rigging, then mount the boat hulls and store the equipment safely on a trailer. Once the team arrives at the regatta venue this process happens in reverse order to get the boats ready for rowing again. It is always super time consuming and I don’t know anyone who enjoys it, but it is a necessity. Once the transportation preparation is done, usually there is an atmosphere of excitement as it signals that we are ready to hit the road. This excitement is especially noticeable for the very first regatta of the season where nobody knows what to expect. The earlier the athletes are in their rowing career the more this holds true. 

Amine and I decided to go to Europe’s largest blockchain developer conference in Amsterdam, DevConnect organised by ETHGlobal, from April 20th to 24th. We got our tickets, reached out to some participants via Twitter and LinkedIn to schedule meetings, and then hit the road! We did not really know what to expect and how the wider web3 developer community is going to react to us and our ideas. However, the only chance to find out was to face reality. Pre-season was over.

Adjusting the plan 🧭

After the first regatta of the season the team knows where they stand. Especially how more work needs to be done and in which aspects to get better. It is necessary to adjust the trainings plan and the focus for the next training period. Time is running until the next competition. Progress needs to be achieved in all the phases of the season to achieve peak performance at championships. 

Going to Amsterdam was the right decision. We learned a lot (see this tweet about our top 3 learnings) and got some very exciting initial signals of potential customers. But we also came back to Berlin with some big question marks. We sat down to discuss, adjust and align on the next steps. Now it is time to put it into action. Upwards and onwards!

Warm-up and get ready

When you are waiting to swim into the start blocks for a rowing race you do not want to arrive with cold muscles. The umpire calls out your team’s name and the lane you have to line up in. In that moment you need to be ready for racing with full focus. Usually teams start their warm-up rituals one hour before the starting time, first some physical activity on land will be completed before taking the boat on the water and starting to row.With the same mentality I started my entrepreneurial journey. I have not only talked to 22 cohort members already before kick-off weekend (KOWE), but during KOWE, which happened 2 weeks before the actual programme start, also very quickly teamed up with Amine, a brilliant co-founder I have enjoyed working with ever since the first time we sat down together to ideate. Even though we knew that the programme starts on April 4th, we started to warm-up directly after KOWE. We got to know each other better, we did research on the areas we thought we want to work on and we sorted all private stuff like living arrangements etc. in time. In short: we made sure we are set up for starting the programme in our best possible shape. When April 4th arrived we were both pumped to kick this journey off together with 100% commitment and energy.

Getting into the swing

The first strokes of a race are crucial. It is very unlikely to win a rowing race, that usually runs over a distance of 2000m, already in the first strokes. But if you lose a lot of ground at the beginning it is extremely hard to catch up. More importantly the team has to get into the swing from the very beginning to set a rhythm and pace for the hard minutes to come afterwards. In The *Boys in the Boat *the rowing expert and boat builder George Pocock is quoted explaining swing

“Therein lies the secret of successful crews: Their swing makes the work of propelling the shell a delight.”

Swing is only achieved when the team members work together in perfection. Teams that have swing overachieve beyond the sum of the individual’s efforts.

I dare to say that Amine and I have achieved this swing very quickly. How we work together and the way we amplify each other is a real delight. We have set a nice rhythm and working together feels really good (we are waiting with excitement for our first really hard setback 😉).

Acceleration at each stroke

Back in 2014, the year I went on to compete at the U23 world championships in the lightweight men’s pair, we started the preparation for the season with very intense training sessions, focusing a lot on boat acceleration. We practiced one start after the other with one main goal: accelerating the boat at each stroke. When we reached the top speed we tried to keep it up as long as possible and repeated the whole exercise as soon as we slowed down a little. At world championship level every crew is firing out of the start block as fast as possible.

At Entrepreneur First we were told a lot about successful teams having urgency for progress. The quicker we learn the faster we can iterate over our belief and idea the sooner we will reach the next stage of our startup journey. Amine and I are pushing each other. We want to accelerate every single day and we know this is going to set us up for the next stage in the best possible way.

What’s next

Of course starting a company is not similar to a usual rowing race. While a rowing race ends after 2000meters or 6-7 minutes, building a company is a marathon. Having successfully completed a rowing marathon for Shanghai Rowing Club in China in 2018, I also experienced some long distance racing in the boat. And in essence, rowing a marathon is not much different to rowing the olympic distance. The team tries to kick off as fast as possible, find a good swing and then fight to keep it up. The only real difference is there are a lot more phases of pain the team has to endure.

We are ready for the rollercoaster of building a scaling and lasting company, knowing that tough times are waiting for us. We are now moving towards the next stage of the race, stroke by stroke, with a joint big vision and dedication to win.

Stay tuned for more.