#34 - No One's Coming to Bail Me Out.

I love my manager. Every weekday at 9 am, he takes out his biggest spoon and proceeds to eat as much shit as he can until the clock strikes 5.

He takes every mind-numbing meeting. Answers every inbound question. Manages every tedious Jira tasks. He does all of this and more so that his direct reports can keep their heads down and work freely.

Beyond all that, he also takes ownership of every emergency situation. And that’s the quality I’ve grown to appreciate the most.

When something breaks and I have no clue how to fix it, I know I can always turn to my manager. He’ll calmly join me on my sinking ship, shouldering that big-ass spoon of his. Without a word, he’ll begin scooping out water. And he won’t stop until he’s bailed me out.

I’ve seldom had to wave the white flag like that and surrender a problem to him. But it’s a huge comfort to know that I always have the option to when things get hairy.

Except I don’t anymore… at least not at Wednesday Waffles: the startup I’m building outside of work, serving as CTO. There, I’m the guy with the shit-eating spoon, and it looks a whole lot smaller in my hands than it does in my manager’s.

The weight of that never really dawned on me until February 5, a couple of weeks out from our scheduled public launch date. For some undiagnosed reason, our system for syncing data between the the app and the remote database (a system only I was familiar with) was barely working. Users weren’t seeing each others’ posts and messages.

I called my CEO to talk through the problem and he assured me we’d fix it. But I saw doubt on his face for the very first time. I was doubtful too. I genuinely had no clue what was going wrong.

My Fight-Or-Flight instincts kicked in, and I wanted to choose Flight. I wanted to wave my white flag and have my manager swoop in to rescue me. And that’s when it hit me:

No one’s coming to bail me out.

It was a terrifying, hopeless feeling. But it was also clarifying. There was no wiser, more seasoned engineer with a spoon bigger than my own who could come save our sinking ship. For the first time, I understood what true ownership means — that when your Fight-Or-Flight instincts kick in, Flight isn’t one of your options.

So I chose to Fight instead. I embraced ownership of the problem. I asked myself, “What would my manager do?”, and I went from there. And a coffee and an all-nighter later, I found the hole and I patched it. I bailed myself out.

Being a founder is downright terrifying sometimes. And despite my deep-seated belief that we’re building something the world wants and needs, the startup survival stats are a reminder that there’s no guarantee that we’ll be paid back for all the fear and stress we’ve endured.

But I have to constantly remind myself that this business is not the asset I’m building. I am the asset I’m building. Every knockdown is an opportunity for me to stand up stronger, looking more like the man I wish to be than before I hit the mat.

So to any founder reading this: Know that no one’s coming to bail you out. And that’s gift. Grab a spoon.

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See you next week — Rayhan