Last August, after much reflection, I joined Float. After a year, I thought it was important to check in with myself and see how I’m doing. How I’m feeling.
The tl;dr here is: I am proud of what I’ve accomplished at Float so far and I feel like I still have much more to accomplish. This is a good state of mind for me, it’s what kept me at Artsy for seven years. My plan is to continue making Float the kind of place where I want to be for a long time.
Most of my career has been spent in startups of various sizes. Recently, I tried working at a large publicly-traded company. Upon reflection, I don’t think my time was well spent there. The work I did was good, but not great. The scale of my impact was impressive, relatively speaking. My work was valuable, if not valued.
Returning to an early-stage startup has felt like a breath of fresh air.
It is a challenge. I feel challenged and I like it.
I joined in late August to lead mobile development and by early December, Float had launched its mobile app on Android and iOS. Financial services was a whole new domain to me and I had to get up to speed fast. I learned Float’s existing products, met with Float’s customers, and asked so many questions. At the same time, I guided our small team through the planning, design, build, test, and deploy phases of a new product.
All in three months.
I learned a lot. The most valuable lessons were what I learned about myself.
It turns out that I actually respond really well to external pressure. This seems obvious to me now, but I had forgotten at some point. The only catch is: I need to understand why something is important. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t drive me, but when I understand why something is important then my intrinsic motivation kicks in.
For example, just two days before our app launch, we discovered a show-stopping bug. The kind of bug that would scupper the launch. That Sunday evening was spent on a call with two other developers and our product manager. We identified the problem, fixed it gracefully, and deployed that fix to unblock our launch.
I haven’t felt that kind of thrill in a long time. It reminded me of my best moments at Artsy. I had been on-call during a multi-day incident and when it was over, my coworker told me:
It’s rare and odd to say dealing with incident was fun, but with your help it actually was productive and fun.
My time at Float has reconnected me with my drive and with my vocation.
I have lots of experience working remotely. My entire first year at Artsy was remote across an ocean. I thought I knew how to work remotely, but the pandemic was a shift for everyone. Since then, any job I’ve worked at has been as a fully-remote worker. Ironically, this taught me the value of in-person interactions.
At home in my office, I can get a lot of code written. But anyone who has worked with me would tell you that the code I write is not always the most important contribution I make. The relationships with my coworkers and the context I gather helps me understand what is the most important thing to do at any moment. Sometimes that is writing code. Often it’s something else.
During two years at my previous employer, I got to meet my coworkers in-person once. In contrast, I’ve actually lost track of how many times I’ve met my coworkers in-person at Float. I forgot how important these connections are for me and for my work.
I feel grateful and privileged to be able to both work remotely from New Brunswick and develop in-person relationships on a high-performing team. It almost feels like a responsibilty, to take advantage of this opportunity to get exactly what I want out of life, personally and professionally.
My first year at Float has been filled with challenges, both at work and in my personal life.
I feel a familiar sense of accomplishment, but one that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s odd. Looking back, I think I started avoiding difficulty. I remember doing hard things but I think that the trauma of the pandemic had pushed me to prioritize comfort. It’s reductive to blame this entirely on the pandemic, but you try living in Manhattan and having surgery in April 2020. The experience changed me.
Last summer, I was suddenly thrown into a job search. It was a huge challenge. My comfort was ripped away from me. I knew the stakes so I took the task of finding a new job seriously. And even though I wanted to get a job as soon as possible (so I could feel secure), I took the next month off to tend to my personal life and reflect on what I wanted next in my career. This was crucial. Knowing exactly what I was looking for gave me a lot of confidence. Managing the stress of the job search became part of the challenge, too.
At some point, I realized that I had become cautious. Conservative in my career. Quiet at work. Afraid to rock the boat.
Maybe it has to do with the pandemic. Maybe it has to do with getting older.
There is comfort in comfort, but there is security in resiliency.
Float has presented me with a lot of challenges. Some are challenges shared by every startup at Float’s stage. Some are unique challenges that I wouldn’t find elsewhere. They were all challenges to me. By tackling those challenges head-on and overcoming them in my own unique way, I have reonnected with my resiliency.
By spending half my career at Artsy, I had learned to work with art-adjacent people solving problems for the art world. Float solves problems for businesses. I work with business-adjacent people. Ideas and opinions that are “taken as read” in one place would need to be argued from first principles at the other. It shouldn’t be surprising that some skills that worked at Artsy don’t work at Float – or, at least they needed to be modified.
Float has given me a new lens with which to look at myself and my career. This year has seen me reconnect with the part of myself that isn’t afraid to take risks, isn’t afraid to speak up, and isn’t afraid to rock the boat.
I feel confident again. Outspoken. Intent on doing what is right.
Most software development is modifying a codebase that already exists; building an entirely new piece of software is rare and exciting. It’s also very risky. You need to lay a solid foundation, knowing that your foundation will almost certainly need to change. You need to leave the right amount of wiggle room around specific decisions so you can pivot quickly later. It’s very exciting.
I applied my professional philosophy and it worked. I focused on learning how to build a great product as a team, and lo: a great product was made, as if as a byproduct. This was a team effort, and I take a lot of pride in my supportive leadership. I made sure at every critical step, from git init to yarn release, we worked together as team so we could all share the sense of accomplishment.
After this frenzy of product development and launch, I had the holiday break to catch my breath and think about what to do next. I hit the ground running in January, putting plans into action and gathering context for my next phase of technical, cultural leadership at Float. Stay tuned for more.
I feel it in my bones that my time at Float has already been worthwhile. I’ve grown. I am more competent and confident as a leader now than when I joined. I learned a lot about software development and my technical skills are sharper than ever. I’ve built products to a level of quality that I am satisfied with and I’ve seen the impact that those products have on customers.
But most importantly, I’ve been an open an honest version of myself. I have “brought my whole self to work” at a time when that sense of self is shifting. The first criteria in my job search was to find a company with good people. My team have made it easy to be that honest self. When I have “done technical leadership” at Float in my own unique way, I’ve been encouraged to go further. It’s a virtuous cycle.
So much of what I bring to a company is building up context and relationships. I want to stay at companies a long time because I benefit from increasing returns the longer I am there. Part of my work is making the company worth staying at for a long time, and I feel empowered to make that happen at Float.
No blog post from someone celebrating their first year at a growing startup would be complete without a link to Float’s careers page. I joined Float after meeting with one of its software engineers for a candid, honest conversation about the company. I would be chuffed to meet you and have a similar conversation, so reach out.