Personality types
I am the sort of neat person who likes to get everything “ship-shape and Bristol fashion”. My wife will tell you that I am too tidy. Funnily enough I wouldn’t agree with that, but I would agree that untidy things nag at me until they’re fixed.
I have tended to think this is a good trait, but I am becoming increasingly sure that this personality type is somewhat incompatible with trying to make a start-up. There’s simply so many niggly things to worry about (as you’ll have gathered from this blog) that to be on top of them means you have no time to actually start your start-up (as you’ll also have gathered). I think that somebody like me has to let some things go, and ignore some very important matters, or they will be unable to get their company off the ground.
I suspect this is the reason why lots of small companies get in trouble with the HM Revenue etc. for not filing tax returns on time, for example. Or (I suspect, though I have no evidence) why a lot of them don’t make enough backups and lose all their data. There’s just no alternative: you get nowhere if you look after everything.
I think I am on top of most of this stuff now, but I am not sure I should have been quite so diligent. I should probably have just let things go wrong, and waited until I got angry letters from HMRC before thinking about tax, accountants etc. And waiting until I lost my data before making a back-up strategy. And waiting until I got sued by Symbian before starting to negotiate about IP, licenses etc.
Oh well. I’d still prefer to be in the situation I’m in now, I think. Just. In some ways I’d rather be at the bottom of that organisational mountain, if it meant I was at the top of my initial-coding-phase mountain. A mountain that just doesn’t seem to get any smaller.