People’s Software Company

Hop! (Cropped)

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

When people ask me what TechStars was like, I’ve got a line — because I’ve always got one. I say, “It was like sticking my head in an active washing machine — again, and again, and again.”

So as long as the drive from Boulder to Boston was, I was glad for it. (Okay, I could have lost the last 500 of those 1,982 miles). I was glad because creativity isn’t an industrial process; making software isn’t an industrial process; teambuilding isn’t an industrial process; growing a community isn’t an industrial process.

My lesson about all of these is that you can go fast — but you can’t go fast with all of them all of the time. At a recent coffee with a friend, I said that trying to rush teambuilding was a bit like watering a plant three times as much while yelling “Go FASTER!!”

I sat in my car, going point to point from Boulder to North Platte, Nebraska; from North Platte to Davenport, Iowa; from Davenport, Iowa, to Erie, PA; from Erie at last to Watertown, MA, the Boston suburb where I live with my husband and two kids.

And I’m proud to say I didn’t have a single idea the whole time.

Well, okay, I’m fronting a little. A lot. It bothers me to have an empty head like that. It’s not normal — it just feels, well, wrong. It feels wrong even though I know it is normal — because it’s part of the normal process of Making Stuff.

I am an irrepressible Maker of Stuff. I left my old (beloved) job at Yankee Group, where I ran a division of analysts who wrote, talked, and studied the enterprise software market to slow down when I had my two sons.

About five days later, of course, I was bored (yes, you can love your children and be bored. Don’t look at me like that). I had…projects. Hobbies! Yes, let’s call them hobbies…until two of them turned into startups (okay, that look, I deserve it).

The think about the process of Making Stuff is that it’s not a nice even ramp where you start out with an idea and progress smoothly towards your goal in a state where you’ve spent ten percent of the time you’ve got and you’re ten percent complete.

Instead, I find that there are three phases of the cycle, and it’s a wheel I turn over any number of times while I’m engaged in a given project. They are:

1. Invention
2. Production
3. Rest

Invention is the most magical period of the cycle — it’s when I have so many ideas I can’t write them down fast enough. It’s the part where some fundamental insight strikes me, and then the fun part is rolling that out, elaborating it, seeing where it could go and what it could do.
Production is figuring out HOW to get those ideas into reality. In its own way, it’s just as creative as invention, because ideas don’t generally come with a neat how-to laying out simple, easy to follow steps. Often the quality of an idea is determined not by its beauty or scope but because it comes with an entry point — something simple but effective to do to get started, and an iterative strategy for inventing what the next steps are when it’s not clear, exactly, where to go. And then there’s the doing; ah, the blissful doing. (Except when it’s your turn to shave the yak).
Then, at some point, the progress slows. I put more effort in, and less comes out — or the whole process suffers some sort of unforseen crash and it’s not clear how (or sometimes if) I can get it started again. Then comes the part I like least: Rest.

I hate resting. I’m allergic to it. I think it literally makes me itchy. I’m not proud of that. It’s just that I want to keep going, and the real world, unlike the creative process, is a smooth linear machine — one hour later is one hour that’s gone. From the outside, it just looks like you’re slacking off, or that you’re a complete flake. But that’s the way it is — it would be nice to have new things appear as regularly as widgets drop off an assembly line — but that’s just not how it works.

I’m always the most impatient with the rest cycle, but in my experience it takes as long as it takes. It worried me a little bit when I arrived in Boston with my head still feeling like a goldfish bowl without any residents, but looking back on it, I shouldn’t have been surprised. In general, the longer or more intensive a production phase is, the deeper the rest cycle is.

My advice for Makers of Stuff reading this is as follows: Use your Rest Cycle to clean up your mess. Yeah, you know, those parking tickets you let pile up, those un-returned (and perhaps not listened to) voice mails, those connections you let slide. Do your laundry. Slay the recycling monster. Yes, you really should visit the dentist once a year, now’s a great time to make all those appointments. Take a look in your wallet. Oops, did you forget to renew your drivers’ license? Ummmmm….maybe time to do it is now, ‘mkay? A little friends and family maintenance is probably in order, too.

So now, my house is clean, I’ve had my cholesterol checked (very good, thank you for all the healthy food, Boulder) my children have school clothes, I’ve actually unpacked.

Hey…wait a minute…I have an idea! Okay, gotta go — talk to you later! (Don’t take it personally if I don’t get back right away, ‘k? See you around Twitter!)