Close Calls
You know, those moments.
Here’s a video I recently rediscovered from December 2014. If you’ve ever been a founder, you’ve been in this situation. These moments are difficult to explain because, even with extensive preparation, they catch you off-guard and make an already chaotic environment even more unstable.
Being lucky and creating your own luck are different and as founders, we rely on them co-existing and not being mutually exclusive.
It may not be altogether obvious at the time but luck plays a role in these situations. Of course on face value it’s all about how you and your team respond when the unexpected happens. But the truth of the matter is that the only reason your team can respond effectively is that the right people were assembled to form a team in the first place. The only way that can happen is if you connect with exceptional people who complement your belief, motivation, expertise and availability and decide to join forces and create a new order.
This happens rarely but when it does it’s because founders give detailed consideration to their hiring plans or achieve specific clarity about the attributes needed in their future co-founders. They then act on this knowledge and grow their team. It might not result in finding the right people immediately but you’ll know who to target. This is an example of creating your own luck.
If you consider the alternative — winging it and hoping the right people will find you — that’s leaving the future to chance which means to be successful you need to be lucky. No thanks.
Company building is made an order of magnitude harder by not having a team that can adapt, innovate and overcome issues that stand between you and the mission objective. However, when the right collection of people bring their A-Game and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to build the future, possibility turns into game-changing product. That’s also why, soon after this video was shot and with 18 minutes to spare, we were back online and ready to unveil AirShr.
Today, 18 months later, AirShr is a powerful platform. We look back on this video, laugh and consider it a close call but not lucky, that luck was created well before we arrived in Dubai.
