What a f*cking privilege

Yesterday, it dawned on me that I had spent ~100% of my waking hours on ANTENNA. We started the day watching Garfield on Disney+ (anything with talking animals results in a quiet household around here). After a session on popular subscription fitness apps, Zwift and Strava, I logged onto work. Of course, ANTENNA’s customer base is made up entirely of subscription media companies. After winding down, my wife & I flipped on The Expanse on Amazon Prime Video. So, yeah, ~100% of my day thinking about or consuming subscription media.

This level of obsession with a single idea takes an intense amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy. And with 2 kids under 2 years old, the demands on my energy stores don’t stop there.

I used to wonder how one knew when their startup hit the fabled Product / Market fit. I wondered what it really felt like: was The Hard Thing About Hard Things or High Growth Handbook reality? Well, good news: we’re there. Whatever happens from here, we’ve cleared that one, all-important hurdle. These days, my mind is filled with questions like:

• How could we possibly get this in front of everyone who would benefit from it fast enough?

• How can we ship product faster…like our lives depend on it…to satisfy demand?

• Once we do, how do we ensure that we’re delivering on all our promises…and making our customers overjoyed to be ANTENNA customers?

• How will I scale our culture of intensity, selflessness, and curiosity once I can’t speak with everyone on the team every week?

• How do we create processes to foster overachievement without losing our edge?

These are tough questions. There aren’t any obvious right answers. They require trade-offs. They have human consequences. Many of these decisions must be made well below Jeff Bezos’s 70% threshold — IE: from a place of naïveté.

This is all to say, it’s exhausting work.

And when I’m most exhausted, I find myself coming back to the same familiar mantra: what a f*cking privilege it is to do this.

• what a f*cking privilege that, if we succeed, it means a healthier media ecosystem that can continue to do what it does best: tell powerful stories that change the world.

• what a f*cking privilege that I spend hundreds of hours with such intelligent, ambitious, and earnest people.

• what a f*cking privilege that a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic acted as an accelerant and a tailwind.

Even on the most stressful weeks, when I don’t have a calorie left to burn, the opportunity to commit so fully to an idea, a group of people, a goal is the ultimate form of human fulfillment. Sadly, this isn’t the status quo in the workplace today. But hey, if you’re thinking about making the leap, remember that one simple mantra — hopefully it’ll push you over the edge.