After a little over 3 1/2 years, I bid adieu to CrossLoop as an employee and to a journey that lived strong the mantra that matters most to me: "He not busy being born is busy dying" [by Bob Dylan].
I had never:
- Been at almost ground zero of a startup. The closest was my prior job at LinkedIn as the first business development manager in 2004 with ~20 employees
- Raised venture money or had relationships with a single venture capitalist. CrossLoop raised $9M through El Dorado and Venrock
- Created global awareness of a brand from scratch amongst millions of users in hundreds of countries. CrossLoop now has ~3M users with ~9M sessions
- Had relationships with bloggers. CrossLoop was covered by popular blogs like Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Lifehacker and others thanks to a start by the likes of Scobleizer post and show and TechRepublic
- Had relationships with mainstream media. CrossLoop was written up in national media like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, PC World with significant coverage across both media
- Had a chance to think through and design a web consumer product
- Hacked a social media distribution network together, which is detailed about on my guest post on Techcrunch: Screening The News
- Been involved in hiring, managing and enabling someone to grow personally and professionally
- Grasped the power of "failure". As Thomas Edison said - "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work"
- Finally and most importantly, realized that startups are an act of art. An act very much like Circue du Soleil [More on that later]
The chase against all odds began when I was unemployed [in the last dot-com downturn - details here on my podcast with TechRepublic] and then somewhere along the way, I got addicted to it. The destination changed quickly .. from a paycheck to a purpose beyond that but through startups. More on that purpose later but here is an illustration [from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus] to signify the importance of the change in direction:
People implied I was foolish when:
- I left a successful career at Tata Elxsi in India to chase my dream and start all over professionally by coming to the US to study. In hindsight, I was my first startup - I was the co./product that raised money through a student loan, after arrival, for which I needed to identify a private student load for international students and then convince a US citizen to be my guarantor.
- I left Sprint to take the job at LinkedIn (then an early stage startup in social networking - what was that?] in 2004 right after I had been unemployed for 3 years
- When I left LinkedIn to co-found CrossLoop
- and now to leave CrossLoop in this economy
Continuing to stay hungry, stay foolish .. from here to infinity!
