THE RIGHT WORK, THE WRONG ROOM
Passover, a Rejection, and Shabbat Clarity
This one is going to be super short because this has really been one of the busiest weeks since I started my project, Ardvarq, and I almost did not write at all… but I really felt like I needed to get this on paper because I think this very well could be the most meaningful week of the entire process so far.
Wednesday night I sat at seder and listened to the story the way I have every year of my life. A people who spent generations doing backbreaking work for someone who was never going to free them, and the work was real, and Pharaoh did not care, and they could have kept going forever if something had not broken them out. I sat there with my friends and I listened and I had no idea that I was twelve hours away from living a different version of it.
The week or so leading up to this point, I had been preparing for a meeting with an investor, the kind of guy who if he comes in brings everyone else behind him. By Thursday night I had my numbers perfected, my thesis deeper than it has ever been, over a thousand students on my product at CU Boulder, testimonials from professors and advisors, students from other schools reaching out on their own. I felt like I could walk into any room on the planet and make someone believe in what I am building. Friday morning I sat down across from him in a private room at a shared office in Boulder, my cofounder right next to me, more prepared than I have ever been for anything.
He told me within the first three minutes that he was nowhere close to interested.
And I felt my shoulders drop, and it was not defeat. It was relief. Because in that moment, sitting across from this man watching him respond to my pitch the way he did, the only thing going through me was this massive, immediate clarity that I had pulled over too early. I was on the right road. I have been on the right road. I have student after student, advisor after advisor, professor after professor proving that the problem I am solving is real and that my product works and that someone needs to build what I am building. The confidence I had walking into that room did not leave when he said no. I just realized I had gotten ahead of myself. I looked up too soon, tried to skip to the fundraising before I had earned it, and sat down across from someone who needed proof I had not gone out and gotten yet.
He gave me thirty minutes after that and I am grateful for every one of them. He told me what I had not proven, that someone will pay, that I can land a second university, that I can deal with the bureaucracy, and he was right about all of it. And the whole time he was talking I was already reorganizing because I could see so clearly that I had been placing my effort in exactly the right places and bringing the results to the wrong person. The universities and the professors and the students, those are the ones who feel this problem. If I get them on the dotted line the money follows. I do not need to convince investors first. I need to put my head down and keep proving it to the people I am actually trying to help, and the rest comes when the rest comes.
I called my cofounder from the car. We have been chasing the right everything for the wrong audience, I told him. I have more clarity right now than I have had in months.
Friday night I went to Shabbat. Small one, a few close friends, because everyone had been at Chabad for Passover on Wednesday and Thursday and most people were spent. I turned my phone off around 6:30, the way I do every Friday. It stays off until Saturday morning. For a few hours every week I am completely unreachable and I am just a person in a room with people I care about and whatever my mind wants to do with the quiet.
During services, reading the prayers, my brain pulled the seder from Wednesday night and the meeting from that morning together and I could see them layered right on top of each other. Wednesday I listened to the story of a people who spent their lives building for someone who was never going to see their value. Friday morning I sat across from a man and did the same thing. I had been on the right road the entire time and I pulled over at the wrong stop. The Israelites did not take the short route out of Egypt, they went through the wilderness, and the long way was the whole point because it prepared them for what was on the other side. I think I am in the wilderness right now. I think I am supposed to be.
If he had given me money on Friday morning it would have sent me the wrong way. I would have kept pitching investors, kept building the deck, kept taking my work to people who do not live inside the problem I am solving. The no put my head back down. It was the best thing he could have given me. The bread did not have time to rise when the Israelites left Egypt and they went anyway because waiting would have meant staying, and I am going, I do not have every contract or every proof point but I am going because I know this is real and if it does not happen today it happens tomorrow and nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to knock me off this road.
The exercise was on point this week, the diet was on point, the people were on point, the work was on point. And then Friday morning I walked into a meeting thinking I was about to hit a home run, struck out in three pitches, and somehow left hitting for the cycle. I am on the right road. I just needed someone to tell me to stop pulling over and keep driving.