Paul Graham has an excellent essay entitled “What Startups are Really Like.” Read it here.
I found myself surprised at how often I agreed with the words of PG or the entrepreneurs he quoted within. My experience working at Athleon has taught me many of the lessons he mentions within his essay. Particularly, the lesson that entrepreneurs work on a different time-flow than the rest of the world, and the emotional roller coaster a startup can be.
Over the course of the past year, I have loved working with Brent, Ryan, Jason, and Dan on Athleon and I am incredibly proud of the product and how far it has come in a year. With this small team of 5 (now 4), we have launched All Team Apparel, the Game Film beta, an updated version of Playbooks, and rewritten large components of the back-end code (running on Debian Linux, Apache 2, MySQL, and Perl with some features written in Flex/AS3) to prepare the site to scale for future growth.
Nobody says startup life is easy. The past year has not been, but I wouldn’t do things differently. The lessons I’ve learned have been valuable, hard-earned, and worth it.
