Techstars Diary: creating a system which gets you more time to work

One of the early lessons for us at Techstars was the importance of prioritizing. You simply don’t have enough time to work on everything that you think it’s important to your business. 

And learning how to identify and choose the things that will bring you 80% of the result with 20% is crucial. So, as founders, in order to have the mental space to make those tough decisions we need brain power. And that means eliminating unnecessary decisions by creating (wherever possible) an automated system that runs by itself.

I believe I did that during the morning routine. Observe the following:

6:30 AM is our usual waking time if we have no calls with Europe during the morning. 

• 15 min spent in the bathroom, then go straight upstairs and get 2 pots of water boiling. Run downstairs, get dressed and prepare the backpack. Hurry upstairs, put half a bag of pasta in one pot and exactly 4 hot dogs in the other.
• Then jump to the espresso maker and by the time coffee’s ready, the hot dogs should be as well. Now comes the first stir in the pasta pot. Eat between 1.5 - 2 hotdogs and stir one more time. Finish the remaining hotdogs.
• Drain the pasta and put them in the lunch box. Curse if you forgot to wash that rotten box the night before. Open the sauce jar, put aprox two fifths inside, do one final stir to mix them together and place the box inside the backpack.
• Put all the dirty dishes in the dishwasher (Hallelujah!) and then check for Gabi.

This process should take between 55 and 60 minutes. I sincerely have no idea what Gabi does during this time, but if she is not ready, I start panicking. I then remind myself that we have a buffer of another 3-4 more minutes before we absolutely need to leave our house in Twin Peaks.

We usually need around 50 minutes to get to the Techstars office in Oakland using the 2 local subway systems: Muni for the rides inside San Francisco and BART for traveling within the Bay Area. The problem is that both of these subways are almost as unreliable as the one in NYC. But in New York you can get out and find another subway station in 2 minutes.

Here you’re fucked; unless you either take an Uber, or jump into the nearest ad hoc coffee place you can find, hoping for good wi-fi and a power outlet. Trust me, when you’re about to have six back to back calls with potential customers and/or investors, you just don’t want those kinds of variables.

Building that system and routines fast is the best way I know to eliminate unnecessary decisions and keep my neurons sane for the actual work: Chambr. 

Once we arrive at the office, the Techstars program starts. The first weeks were filled with live sessions and workshops, many about the upcoming JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) interviews. These sessions also helped us bond together as one big cohort of founders. The next 1.5 weeks were more flexible in order to allow us time to conduct the JTBD interviews. 

After these we would enter the famous Mentor Madness - a 1.5 week period during which we would have back to back meetings with various mentors from the Techstars community.

Going through all of this required us to heavily prioritize tasks and learn to work in chunks of 30 minutes (25 min work, 5 min break). It was a bit unnatural for us because we were used to working within larger time slots. But this allowed us to make use of every 30 min break from the program as best as we could. 

Because the FOMO (fear of missing opportunities) that I mentioned in a previous article was very real. And in this context it meant fear of not having time to put into practice all that we learned.

More on the findings from our JTBD interviews and Mentor Madness in the next article.

Read the other diary entries about a Romanians startup journey at the Techstars accelerator here.

You can follow me, Gabriela and Chambr on our Linkedin accounts.

And if there is anything you would like to know about being accepted at Techstars, feel free to ask us.