Week 3 at the Alchemist Techstars Blockchain Accelerator Program

The fact that we’re publishing this late very well reflects just how constantly behind schedule we are with everything. Why is that, you ask? As promised last week, this insight will be less about simply describing the events of the past 7 days and more about how these events impacted the energy within the team.

Things look promi$ing

Mentor Madness is still on and we’re constantly getting great feedback from the mentors and others involved. For those who missed what Mentor Madness is — it’s like speed dating, but we’re meeting with incredible amounts of potential mentors until we find the right one for us. So far, the mentors love the tech, the demo, and they already see the million-dollar lightbulb. It’s intoxicating. It feels like nothing can go wrong, really.

However, there are also some folks who are skeptical about how we’re going about certain things. They provide feedback which is not so easy to digest and it’s likely on point. But there are times we pretend we don’t hear it — of course we rather be liked. But aren’t these the guys who we should actually pay attention to? Shouldn’t we take a step back for a moment and try to revisit our attitudes? Yes. And we are.

If nothing else, people here can really make you feel like you are a rockstar. “I know people who are gonna write you a cheque immediately.” For sure this can dramatically help to boost your team’s morale and give you some extra energy — as it just worked for us. On the other hand, if you keep listening to these compliments too much, they may have the exact opposite effect. You lose focus and begin to be all over the place.

Let’s do this now and forget that thing we’d agreed on a couple of hours before.

Praise is pleasing, however, critique is necessary.

The trick is finding the right balance between the two when absorbing it.

How we hit problems and then got over them

The hardest part is admitting it to ourselves. Avoiding the discomfort of talking about the problems early on just makes them much more poisonous later. Problems don’t disappear, they may just temporarily go out of sight but they are still growing there in the meantime. But once the team manages to notice them, it’s the first step of getting back on the right track again.

In our case, the problem was working ineffectively which resulted in long hours without clearly visible results. When working on decks, demo videos or simply writing follow-ups to people we met — all the vehicles that are supposed to get us closer to hitting our KPIs — we did not manage very well.

We identified the following as the root causes of our issues:

1) weak communication within the team in NY and the team based in Prague, 2) the whole team working on tasks that are better done by an individual, and 3) spending too much time on details during times when we need to move fast and iterate quickly.

So besides being overworked, all of this resulted in an unhealthy working environment, bad productivity and having to skip classes and talks organized by Techstars to finish things.

This needed to change and fortunately, we managed to start working on improving the situation early enough. We started to divide the work better, by having a single person responsible for keeping the team in Europe in sync with the US one, and most importantly, we actually started following the lean/agile principles (point 3).

It wasn’t just about us moving slowly. We never really challenged ourselves to think about the quickest and cheapest version of the thing we were trying to get out, ask for the appropriate feedback (measure the outcomes) and use it in the next iteration. I’m not talking about coding or designing product parts. We had to apply this to pretty much any daily task you can think of — like composing emails, editing business decks and other presentation materials or even making changes to our pitch. When the environment moves fast, the iterations need to be fast as well.

Is all of this necessary?

We were stretching ourselves thin here quite a bit.

This lifestyle of working six days a week while not getting enough sleep and constantly staring at a screen can rightfully be considered as, well, fucked up. It’s not possible to go like this for a long period of time.

Can you do it for three months?

A better question might be: Is this necessary at all?

Sure, the work ethic here in NY is contagious. People in high positions react to emails almost immediately, offer to meet during the weekend or late in the night to push things forward. The sense of urgency is visible and we felt we just needed to do everything. At one point, that stopped being doable and we had to pause, look at what we were doing from a distance and rethink our priorities again. Even though it felt like we had to react to every stimulus instantly, there’s always at least as much noise as the actual signal coming.

The learning point?

Adjust our filters soon and choose only what really matters.

We manage to stay sane

To wrap this up on a more positive note, we do stuff to stay sane and it does the job for us. We work out, go to have a massage or go for a walk during the weekend. We cook and eat out. Physical activity has the greatest and almost immediate impact on improving our mental health state. We tested this out for you, and it works. Also, last Saturday, we attended a decent party hosted by one of our Alchemist mentors — thank you for that one! That was a great time to meet new people and folks from the other startups in a slightly different environment and setting. For sure looking forward to the next ones coming.

Cheers, until next time.

“Veracity Protocol enables companies who are having a big problem with counterfeits and fraud like in luxury goods or supply chains to secure the authenticity of any physical item. Unlike companies using tags, chips or markers that need to be embedded and can be removed or tampered with, their solution works by simply taking a photo of an item with a smartphone or a basic camera.”