Apply is not the side company anymore.
In January my plan was to finish a few interviews and learn stickers. I did both. Then COVID hit, every plan moved around, and I had to decide what I was actually going to do.
I had a strong offer from Equinox Media. The company was building a new digital fitness platform around Equinox, SoulCycle, Precision Run, and its other brands. I liked the CEO. I liked the team. I know fitness, and there was a lot about the job that made sense.
I passed.
The offer was good, but the stock terms were not. If I ever left the company, I would have had only 90 days to exercise the options. I was not asking for more salary or more stock. I wanted a longer exercise window so that leaving a job would not also mean finding a large amount of money immediately or losing the equity.
They could not change it. That was a deal breaker for me.
This was not some perfectly confident startup-founder moment. I had stopped a few other conversations because I thought the Equinox job was moving forward. I had already passed on one Facebook path, and I blew another Facebook interview badly enough that I knew I needed to write code again and brush up on systems design. Once I turned down Equinox, part of me felt like I was back at square one.
But I also had a close friend asking me to build a company with him. We had known each other long enough that I trusted the partnership. The company was self-funded. It was early. There was no guarantee that a sticker business would become anything large.
I have enough startup scar tissue to understand that this is not the safe option.
It is still the option I want.
By April 30, I was working on Apply every day. This week we are talking to engineers, figuring out the Shopify store, sorting product requirements, and building a master spreadsheet for the sticker catalog. There are sample stickers all over the floor. We are hiring a couple of people because there is now enough real work to need them.
I wrote the simplest version of the change to a new teammate: I am 100 percent focused on Apply now.
That feels very different from learning stickers.