Stress = |Expectation – Actuality|

Posted on March 10, 2010. Filed under: JumpPost, startups, venture capital | Tags: JumpPost, launch, startups, venture capital |

It’s 1:14 AM on the morning of my company’s launch.  I am sitting at my desk, in a giant empty office…more or less waiting…everyone has gone home for the night, there is no panicking, no last minute hiccups…a couple loose ends to tie up with our lawyers, but oddly enough…we are ready.  This is what’s boring about working with Doug Petkanics… he is painfully reliable.  30 days ago we designed a product development roadmap that predicted we would launch our company today, and sure enough…we are launching our company…today.  Not 1 day late, not 1 hour late…right on freaking schedule.

I often write about the ups and downs, the unpredictability of startup execution, and stupid Doug Petkanics is screwing up my whole shtick.  Prior to bringing Doug on, an early member of JumpPost, Mike Weaver, defined stress to me as “the result of any disconnect between expectation and actuality.”  He said it is in these moments where an event occurs contrary to expectation, that stress is born.  Finally, Mike argued that in order to live a stress free life, we must shed all expectation, and simply live in the moment.  I thought about this for a minute, and then rejected his argument in favor of another that also seemed consistent with his definition of stress.  I said “in order to live a stress free life, you just need to be accurate when defining your expectations. ”

Doug seems to have mastered the alternate theory I put forth, and it is reflected in his consistently cool demeanor under pressure.  I’m not sure I’ve ever worked with someone with such a firm grasp of their own capabilities, but day in and day out, he perfectly calibrates our collective expectations.

Our value proposition is going to hit ~250,000 in boxes in the next 24 hours…should be an interesting first day live for JumpPost.com 🙂

Update: well, not quite 250K…about a 1000 people clicked through to a shared listing we had in NYC’s Thrillist…it’s a start 🙂