In the Spring of 2011 at UC Berkeley, a friend and I started an augmented reality company designed to help tourists learn more about the environment directly around them. It would revolutionize hyperlocal search--just point your phone at any point of interest around you, say, the Transamerica Pyramid, and immediately get historical information, tour times, and photos from the top. Augmented reality would be the next intuitive UI for relevant place search and quickly replace the list view response as the defacto standard. Armed with brilliant technology and an eye for the future, nothing, not even my college student naivety, could get in my way.
During the summer after graduation, I joined an incubator on campus, where I was pressured to pitch to as many investors as possible. I was told to sound as excited as possible because passion sells when you don't have traction. I went to VC after VC pitching with a genuine belief that my product would change the face of tourism.
But we failed to raise. Augmented realty, they said, is a dead space riddled with failed startups with clumsy UIs. In retrospect, we shouldn't have wasted time pitching, and there are a dozen other reasons why we didn't raise that I won't go into here. But with nothing to show after a few months of effort, our enthusiasm was at an all-time low.
We pushed for a big launch, promoting the product to strangers in Union Square, sending emails to bloggers and press, instant messaging all our friends, and getting the school to promote us. The results were quite dismal--a few hundred installs, and lots of confusion on how to use the product. After a couple more weeks of ineffective product refinement and pushes, we gave up.
It's been almost two years now, and I still hate AR. I have no faith in Glass, despite how cool it is (plus, wearables > smartphone for AR). Hell, I won't even touch mobile tourism again for a long while. Regardless of the reasons of failure, my passion was gone, shattered like the glass all over the streets in Berkeley.
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Continuous negative feedback chips away at passion. If day after day nothing you do works, you lose confidence. Sure, you might've learned important life lessons or developed useful skills, but if none of that can save you from the downward slope of failure you're in, then there's no immediate benefit of learning. There's only so much abuse your passion can take if you have nothing to refuel it.
The thing I found works best to refuel passion is progress, whatever form it may be in. It might be learning a new API. It might be getting a first customer. It might even be something as hollow and meaningless as someone saying they like your product.
So F passion. It's too unreliable to bet my startup on it. Give me something that works. Let me do something people want and I will be happy.
During the summer after graduation, I joined an incubator on campus, where I was pressured to pitch to as many investors as possible. I was told to sound as excited as possible because passion sells when you don't have traction. I went to VC after VC pitching with a genuine belief that my product would change the face of tourism.
But we failed to raise. Augmented realty, they said, is a dead space riddled with failed startups with clumsy UIs. In retrospect, we shouldn't have wasted time pitching, and there are a dozen other reasons why we didn't raise that I won't go into here. But with nothing to show after a few months of effort, our enthusiasm was at an all-time low.
We pushed for a big launch, promoting the product to strangers in Union Square, sending emails to bloggers and press, instant messaging all our friends, and getting the school to promote us. The results were quite dismal--a few hundred installs, and lots of confusion on how to use the product. After a couple more weeks of ineffective product refinement and pushes, we gave up.
It's been almost two years now, and I still hate AR. I have no faith in Glass, despite how cool it is (plus, wearables > smartphone for AR). Hell, I won't even touch mobile tourism again for a long while. Regardless of the reasons of failure, my passion was gone, shattered like the glass all over the streets in Berkeley.
------
Continuous negative feedback chips away at passion. If day after day nothing you do works, you lose confidence. Sure, you might've learned important life lessons or developed useful skills, but if none of that can save you from the downward slope of failure you're in, then there's no immediate benefit of learning. There's only so much abuse your passion can take if you have nothing to refuel it.
The thing I found works best to refuel passion is progress, whatever form it may be in. It might be learning a new API. It might be getting a first customer. It might even be something as hollow and meaningless as someone saying they like your product.
So F passion. It's too unreliable to bet my startup on it. Give me something that works. Let me do something people want and I will be happy.
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