I’m exhausted, are you?

I’m writing this Sunday Scaries after traveling from Atlanta (still In the basement of my in-laws) to Denver and San Jose this past week. This was a bit of a last minute trip, so my calendar was booked solid from EST - 8am to 7pm PST. So that math is 14 hour days all week. And now entering a busy week of my 1 day Mastermind Meetup and AEC Summit. Not complaining, I absolutely have created the ideal job/business for myself and love every minute of it (mostly). I am also traveling every week excluding Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks, through January. My personal problem is that I pretty much “run to empty” and then crash.  This means on most days going to sleep at 9:30 or 10. I usually sleep well, but last night I was up until 3am. A very rare occurrence for me. I think I may have run to absolute empty this week. This led me to a question… why? If you read my second book, “What you know about startups is wrong”, you would hold me to task. The life that I am living is not what I recommend in my book. Last week I talked about working harder and smarter. What is going on with me? It’s not me, it’s the season. I believe that we are in the most transformative cycle of innovation I have seen since the internet days of the 90’s. It’s is the season of building an actual unicorn based on disrupting massive and archaic industries. If you caught General Catalysts’ announcement this
week (if you didn’t, you have been living under a rock), they announced an $8B fund to transform big industries like Healthcare and Defense. I would also say that the AEC industry fits squarely in that bucket.
So many startups say it’s hard to raise money these days. Thats actually not true. It’s hard to raise money for startups that aren’t disruptive but rather incremental. If your startup is being judged on its Revenue, it’s incremental. So to raise a round, investors don’t care as much about your vision, but really only care about CAGR and Gross Margins. So regardless of industry, you are in competition with any other startup and their metrics.
For disruptive startups, nobody cares about revenue. All we care about is “when you win, who loses”. In the AEC space there are so many opportunities for this, as long as you have the right mindset. This means you are in competition with anyone that serves the owner/developer. Selling a structural engineer on AI structural engineering software is disinteresting. Trying to put traditional structural engineering out of business is interesting. BTW, I will be speaking at the NCSEA (National Council of Structural Engineering Associations) next month in Vegas :)

https://www.ncseasummit.com/kp-reddy

So if you started your startup a few years ago with an incremental innovation idea, you can either have the metrics to raise OR compete with your customers. When you pitch a VC, you can even make it sound like it was your Trojan horse strategy all along.
Back to the beginning of this newsletter. I find that founders that are disrupting are unapologetically exhausted. The founders doing things incrementally are tired and ask me about how I manage work-life balance. Ask Tom Brady how he managed work-life balance during the NFL season. He didn’t. I have a lot of music friends. They have zero work-life balance when touring or in the studio.
Why am I exhausted? I am working on some big things that are highly disruptive.