Bluebirds and Startups

I’ve noticed the insistent chirping of birds from just outside my office window for the past couple of weeks. This starkly contrasts with my nearly ten years of quiet sitting in the same place. I rather like this tremulous warbling and staccato noise reverberating around like tiny ping-pong balls on a stairwell. Imagine, to my shock and surprise, when looking out my window during yesterday’s surprise snowfall, I see five eastern bluebirds sitting on the gutter across the divide between buildings. It’s the first time I’ve seen it occur since coming here, and hopefully, next time, I’ll have a longer focal length lens to capture them with.

In the cacophony of what I can only imagine is a community meeting, I was reminded that a lot of life tends to resemble this scene. Loosely connected people of some heterogeneity clinging on for dear life to the sides of their stories and careers they’ve tried so hard to establish. When forced to, they mingle with distinct lines of separation between them as if to say, “This is my moment,” and to offset any challenge from another’s encroachment. Funny, that.

I spent the early hours of this morning participating in mentorship sessions with three incredible Irish startups, each focused on a different industry domestically and in the broader transatlantic markets. From inception to actualization, they’re wholly different, choosing technologies and capabilities befitting the founders’ experiences and education. While one could argue that they’ve got steep roads ahead, there’s something beautiful in the ways they’re trying to solve human problems.

You see, much like these bluebirds, they’re gathered together under the banner of an accelerator designed to foster and encourage their growth, networks, and connections from their heads to their hearts and onward to their bank accounts. They’re connected, through a vast network of like-minded individuals, to a wealth of human experience, each with their feathers and flock, willing to share their experiences, fuck-ups, and failures in hopes that success will be found.

Sometimes, this success means absorption into something else. I’ve watched startups end gracefully and tragically. Indeed, my first giant leap into the unknown was to a startup that nosedived into the ground within six months of my start. It was a fast and furious time, and while success wasn’t to be found, it was character-building and life-affirming, and it set the table for new opportunities in the future.

Still, other startups have gone on to great success. One mentee is running a sustainable materials company with her brother, focused on bringing novel new methods of substrate and filler to an industry that consumes an incredible amount of energy for its relatively small size. Others have found success in the pages of trade rags and industry, capitalizing on niche but necessary roles that are understaffed and underserved, especially in a burgeoning global economy.

This new cohort from today has a road ahead that will have many forks and inflection points. From regulatory oversight to new markets across the pond, their skills and abilities will be forged in the flames of the everyday, the novelty of another sales pitch soon wearing off. The one consistent piece of advice I could give across all three was to focus on the story of people.

You see, foundational to every startup, every novelty, every nuance is humanity. Tools aren’t spontaneously generated; they answer a human’s needs. AI is generated by people, not the other way around. We sometimes fail to understand people’s role in making decisions; from the formulas used in pharmacology to the lectures we teach to the mortgages and financial services we offer, everything is based on people.

Finding your fit in this narrative becomes the true mission of a startup. The novelty of your idea has to match an extant question or provide so compelling an offering as to beg the question to be asked of it. Each startup hopes to meet an unmet need, a desire, or a want, sometimes buried within the dark recesses of process management and sometimes hidden in plain sight within a classroom. The ability to communicate these ideals becomes the value offered, with the execution of the offering secondary.

As the day wore on yesterday, the bluebirds escaped into the sky, the snow having stopped, the chill of this January air receding and being replaced by the warmth of a receding sun. The gutter across the way was empty again, sterile and cold against the siding and snow-covered roof. It had served its purpose for the day, and the flock had moved on. So, too, I’ve had my moment with these incredible people, and at some point in the months ahead, we’ll have more discussions and time together. For today, however, I’m content to be their roosting spot, hoping that the respite from the consistent grind will affirm the stories they will undoubtedly tell.

As the sun is now begrudgingly working skyward, I will need to get on with the day and the various bits of technological effluvia lying about this joint. I’m grateful for these moments, however fleeting, where I can be in the company of the incredible and resplendent thinkers seeking to make the probable into the possible.

May it ever be so.