Mike Hudack

What a day!

Today was a perfect example of why being at a start-up is like being on a roller coaster. You go from highs to lows like there’s nothing in between. Because there generally isn’t much in between. Today I:

Woke up early totally refreshed because I went to sleep super early last night.
Was pleasantly surprised that I had an unusually light schedule today.
Went into the office and finally got to Inbox Zero. Yay!
Sent out a Friday goal status e-mail to the whole company. On Friday morning we had gotten about a third of our week’s qualitative goals done, and our quantitative goals for the month were already starting to look pretty good. I was worried about slippage, though — 30% on Friday morning isn’t great.
Newsweek started following me and we reblogged a biz dev deal back and forth. Sweet!
Had an awesome call with a company that can help get us on millions and millions of TVs. Finished the call totally elated.
As soon as I hung up the phone Jared (who runs our network) told me that one of our colocation facilities was offline due to a fiber cut. About half the videos we serve went offline.
Went out for coffee with a candidate for a major position here. It was our second meeting. I really like him. He’s heading up to Boston to meet with our board member from Bain on Tuesday.
Got a text message from Jared saying that the fiber cut was fixed.
Finished up coffee feeling really good.
Got back into the office to hear the content and advertising teams talking about a very unhappy content creator and how to deal with him.
Find out that the content creator — a big content creator — is unhappy because he’s not getting preroll ads anymore. Instead he’s running a campaign that should net him more money, but doesn’t include preroll.
Call the content creator. Discuss the situation with him. Find out he’s a Yankees and Dodgers fan. And a really cool guy. Tell him I’ll call him back in twenty minutes after talking with the guys.
We end up turning preroll back on for the guy. Turns out that really will make him more money right now.
Call the guy back. All good.
Get an e-mail from Newsweek. We’re getting a beer to talk turkey.
Decide that I could use a beer. And then realize it’s only like 4:30.
Deleted this post because it didn’t sit right with me.
Received an e-mail from David asking why I deleted this post, and if it was a bug.
Told him I deleted it.
He said he liked it.
Asked if there was an undelete on Tumblr.
Found out that David is undelete on Tumblr.
Reposted. Thanks David!
Update: Looks like we’ll be hitting the vast majority of our goals this week.

I think that a big part of my job is to minimize the highs and lows. We tend not to celebrate our success too much. When we closed our round with Bain we had a champagne toast in plastic cups. We had enough champaign that everyone got two sips. Then we went back to work. When something really shitty happens we try not to take it personally, figuring that tomorrow is another day.

This doesn’t change the fact that every day at a start-up is a roller coaster. And every week. Every month. Every quarter. It’s supposed to be that way. That’s why it’s fun. And also why it isn’t for everybody.