Driving on “E”
Throughout the course of Astronomer, we’ve been driving on empty. In other words, we’ve only had enough money in the bank to survive, at most, a few months—often less—at a time. We lost count of the number of times we’ve had to warn staff about possibilities of trouble with upcoming paychecks. It was rough.
This forced us to focus on a constant cycle of short-term progress and has been quite stressful for everyone. On the positive side, the pressure to perform has led to higher performance, and caused us to be focused on producing revenue traction, which is a big advantage to us as we approach Series A.
We wouldn’t do it again this way if we had the choice, but if you’re running a startup in the same situation, you probably have some comfort in knowing that better startups are usually created during downturns, and we’re certainly in a bit of one.
Read more at the Astronomer Blog.