Five
I've done a few look back posts about my time here in San Francisco (One, Three) but wanted to really sit down and stew on Five. It's a big number.
Once In a Lifetime by Talking Heads
You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right? Am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?”
People always asked me how I made that choice five years ago. I would reply, half-jokingly, half-sincerely: “Well, doing a PhD with my adviser seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity. But working at some crazy satellite startup? That only comes around every four or five lifetimes at best.” We'll never really know, but looking back, I'm pretty sure my gut instinct was dead on. I've disabled metrics on this website, but I still remember how it felt to post and share this piece of writing from so long ago. And of course, subsequently taking it all back just a month later.
What I didn't write about was the long, miserable week prior to reversing that decision. The first couple days were easy: get an offer. How do I make this go away? Easy, ask for a huge amount more than that. What's a huge amount? I found this lovely strategy:
- Look at yourself in a mirror
- Say your salary
- Did you keep a straight face?
- If YES - increase your salary by
$SOME_AMOUNTand go to step 2 - If NO - congrats, that's what you should ask for
So I did that, and hoped the situation would be over. But alas, it was not over. They bizarrely agreed to it - time for a new strategy. I tried them all - asking friends, girlfriends, guyfriends, siblings, parents, grandparents. I asked the internet. I asked myself constantly. I asked myself in the morning and at night. I asked myself in different states: sober, high, or drunk. I flipped coins and rolled dice. I just couldn't decide. Much like any assignment, it requires a deadline to force an action.
So a few days later, I got that deadline. The CEO and me, sitting on the balcony of that studio apartment. What's it going to be? At that moment I closed my eyes, threw my hopes in the air, and emptied my soul at about 110 dB SPL. When you clear everything out, the only thing left inside is the answer. I was going to stay. The walk back inside would have been considered mortifying if I grounded myself fast enough, but I was safe for that moment. Lots of worried and confused stares that turned into huge smiles, slowly. A round of applause that couldn't qualify as thunderous but still rocked my world.
Somewhat shockingly, that wasn't the craziest thing to happen that month. My first day as a full time employee, I had to do startup job #1: recruiting. I have done over 600 interviews for Astranis so far, but it's crazy how easy it is to remember the first one. There's one simple reason for that: I got to meet my best friend that day.
Remember when we had them all on the run
And the night we saw the midnight sun
Remember saying things like, “We'll sleep when we're dead”
And thinking this feeling was never gonna end
Remember that night you were already in bed
Said, “Fuck it” got up to drink with me instead
So much of my time was spent selling people on this vision and dream. I had no idea what was going to happen (no one did). But the entire time, there was this undercurrent that We Might Just Make It. You always have a choice: do you want it to happen or not? The answer to that question is so simple for everyone: of course they do! I never understood why the followup was difficult: well, then make it so. It's not fake it till you make it, it's just making the dream come true.
I characterize the first couple years as willful naivety on all fronts. We had no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from happily telling everyone we had it under control. Even though there were some frustrating and worrisome times, it was easy to get right past them because we had so many amazing milestones interleaved. New fundraising, customers, launch contracts, offices, demos - it was impossible to slow down. It's mind-blowing how I can “just” write down those insane accomplishments in a few brief words. Let me try and elaborate.
We raised a few million dollars without having any proof of concept, but the hardware was real enough that people believed in it. Everything became “real” at that point to a whole new level. This wasn't just some bunch of friends anymore, this was becoming a Real Company. I thought I knew what the speed would look like, but I was so wrong - it never stopped. Shortly after that, we launched a satellite. I was as sick as a dog that night, but I forced myself to come out for that launch party. In my rideshare over, my driver gave me a couple pills to help with my cold. It's only fair to accept the same level of trust and belief I asked of everyone else, so I knocked them back and walked in to the party. Invincible indeed.
Now it's heads down time to work on the real one. What is it going to be? Who is it going to be for? What should it do? We're all figuring it out live. Sometime during this, we get our first real office. How on earth would we fill that office up? It's gigantic! I remember getting lost in it. Fake grass, dartboards, and one bizarre oval conference room taking up the entire first floor. We slowly turned on lights, network switches, and HVAC. In that office, we built a lab, and I got to do my job. I built hardware and helped demo it to potential customers. It was passion press-fit into a box and it delivered when it needed to. We signed a contract and went for it.
It was all flying by. I got to do my dream job - I was making giant complex hardware! It was all really happening! PCBA's that had a dizzying number of layers, 1000's of component, and through it all I was flying around the CAD tools like an Olympic figure skater. It wasn't easy to build but it got built and it worked. Heck, I even got to take a once in a lifetime (so far) vacation to Japan while a team I built up proved out it worked. Dreams made real via copper and silicon.
Interleaving each and every one of those events was a culture that makes me wish I could bottle the past. Jam sessions, bar outings, new hire parties, game nights, concerts upon concerts - this new normal makes it seem almost impossible in comparison. Those highs weren't just high, they were records.
You Still Believe In Me? by Bomb The Music Industry?
I know fires can last forever, but I need find a match
Cause these days fuck, I'm tired
I used to be an awesome listener
But now I just drift in and out or
Or get pulled away by beats and measures
It's hard to put my finger on when the wave exactly broke. Looking back, I can trivially pick a date when the mayor ended normalcy, but that's not it. It's more like a physicist's experiment: even though it kept kicking for a month or two afterwards, it was already dead.
This is going to be the shortest section I write. I wrote plenty about it before, enough that I don't even want to link to it. Things were tough everywhere, and people redefined invincibility. Was it camaraderie, naivety, or willful ignorance that made me ride a bus to work? I joked that you can put the rationale on my tombstone: I died the way I wish I lived, a man of the people. When people draw lines in the sand, they assume the tide will wash it away by tomorrow. But once all the air is sucked out of the room, you are stuck on the moon, and those lines aren't going anywhere.
Looking back, my biggest question is about what happiness gets defined as. Is it an absolute level? That just doesn't seem right. If you're happy every single day… you're not happy. You're easy going, You're nonchalant. You're peaceful, calm, relaxed, at ease, whatever it may be. But you can't be joyous. Joy requires valleys of darkness. That once-fervent belief that is now cracking at the seams with the fallacies of sunken cost. That idea that if this step doesn't kill you, then buddy, I'm on it.
If I'm right, this was when I was happiest. If my friends are right and Type II Fun exists, that I am confident without a doubt that this was the best time of my life. I am bizarrely so hopeful that I recorded my own personal crest. Two and a half years of frantic turbulence with brief tufts of foam. The wave built and built through the fall of 2021. Every single day in November, just when people thought it couldn't go any higher, I dug deeper and willed it just one inch more. 18 hour days for a month straight. Nights that left me stretched so thin you could breathe through me and feel the warmth on your hand.
When finally, finally, lord willing, it crashed and rode out, I wondered if I should record it. No, that moment was for me alone. Just me, the parking lot, and the last few years echoing around me.
I hope it never happens again.
All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem
Oh, and if the trip and the plan come apart in your head
You looked contorted on yourself you ridiculous prop
You forget what you meant when you read what you said
And yeah we knew you were tired but then
Where are your friends tonight?
The oddest part about moving on is that you get to choose how far away you go. Some people travel thousand of miles to speak new languages as far from home as they can imagine. Some manage to go farther. I moved three times in the last five years, each one's delta deceptively hiding how large it ended up being. I moved 2.3 miles from something I couldn't believe to something I couldn't stop. I moved 5 blocks, from my apartment to my home. I moved 170 ft from what I started to something I built.
I legitimately thought that the scar tissues of the the last few years would merit me immune to this. I'm not against feeling, nay, I love it. But I didn't think those feelings were going to come back as virulently. Out of nowhere, an impulse of memory. Despite doing everything in my power to keep the band together, it wasn't quite the same. The person who literally carried me wasn't there. The person who taught me how to turn a keyboard into a wand wasn't there. The person who taught me it was OK to, well it wasn't OK to, but it wasn't not OK to, but we both did, get angry, wasn't there. The crew that started this, hell, half of them weren't even in the country. Where were my friends tonight?
The majority of these songs were added as decor after the fact, but not this one. James Murphy's voice pounded through my head that night sans permission. It's a driving song that takes its time. Soak in those constant eighth notes from the keyboard - every single one is a reminder that life isn't stopping even as you beg it to.
Where are you friends tonight? Where are my friends tonight? When I'm out there trying to keep two eyes open and not stuck behind a wall of water, I missed them more than anything in the last five years. It was like the piano fell on me: we did it. The previous section was devoid of that beautiful, collective pronoun. It is wrong. No matter how large my pain was, I realized that I could never have gotten through it alone. It suddenly snapped into focus: this was not a song one person could sing.
