Convergences: Founding a business: what the past four months has taught me
Self-reflection as a founder who’s just launched v1.0
Unpopular opinion but as a millennial, I’m nonplussed about horoscopes. I’ve never actively followed but have indulged friends in conversations about characteristics, idiosyncrasies etc. I know my sign, I couldn’t tell you my husband’s, or my son’s.
I am however profoundly intrigued by time and cycles of time. I love thinking about ‘on this day 10 years ago…’ or ‘on this day in 2 years…’. It’s a different kind of dreaminess and self-reflection, much more rooted in empirical learning and future-back vision building.
I also love the synchronicity of time and experience. Consider this week’s total eclipse in Europe, how improbable perfect alignment actually is in the universe.
So it’s perfectly apt, perfectly synchronous, that four years to the day after giving birth to my son Isaac, and 4 months after leaving my career in civil and public service, A Considered Curiosity v1.0 has gone live.
Reflecting on the past four months, the learning curve has been sharp, the self-knowledge runs deep. But here are the top 4 takeaways:
Agility. Be visionary and talk to people about it. The idea isn’t a piece of coal waiting to pressurise into a diamond, it’s a fire which requires stoking. I’ve had the concept for ACC for longer than 15yrs but wanted the perfect vision, perfect structure, perfect risk stratification. Those never came until I started to talk about them, and physically started to build them. It’s still not perfect hence v1.0, but we test and learn, iterate, innovate and improve.
Curiosity. I’m inherently curious so the behaviour was easy. But prioritising my time for curiosity wasn’t. I’ve headed up a team for more than 11yrs and I suddenly found myself doing everything from admin to data architecture, service design to content planning. I’ve previously performed roles where I was constantly recalibrating my thinking but when the stakes feel so high, starting up your own business, capacity and energy for curiosity seems the most logical to deprioritise on any given day. I did the opposite, in fact it’s insulated each day. I read reports, critiques, op-eds, capture my questions, sit with them and revisit throughout the week. I research further. What is the point of having my own schedule if I decree everything is urgent and I can’t be curious? Knowledge is power. Intelligence is authority. Arbitrary deadlines killed the cat, not curiosity.
Practicality. Start-up means being hands-on with everything. I’ve come from central government and the public sector, where the systems are imperfect and bureaucratic but at the very least, there’s something. The joy though is building from scratch, with future scale in mind. And that’s exciting. But again, I miss leading a team, and the work being embolden by its alchemy: the capacity, creativity, expertise and energy of 10 different people. As a team of one, who holds all the intelligence, creativity and risk, I am actually immensely proud of what I’ve achieved so far on my own, not just strategically and structurally, but practically.
Visibility. Even though my self-knowledge is strong (I’m inherently shy, introverted, existential), I unwittingly assumed this would be the easiest part. Each post, even each photograph requires a certain amount of self-coaching. As I am empirical learner, it’s progressively getting less uncomfortable, and actually a friend earlier this week said he wants to see more of my opinions, more of my taste and perspectives online. So expect that to follow in this next phase.
So while my vision for A Considered Curiosity has been ideated and conceptualised for more than 10yrs, building it into a tangible, successful enterprise is an incredible joy and privilege. These past four months have been focused on foundations, and I’m now excited to start building the pillars, connecting with discerning, intelligent people and bringing joy back into fashion, taste, style and deepening identities and experiences in fashion, culture and inextricably in life. Thank you for continuing to follow.
