Event Invite: Enough With The Awards Shows
Starting a company is the single hardest professional endeavor anyone can undertake. And I would know. I borrowed against nearly every asset I had in order to launch Starting Line, and, in the summer of 2018 when it appeared my fundraise was stalling out, came within a single month of defaulting on the majority of what my family owned. My wife Shira, on more than one occasion, had to pick me up off the floor, shaking, dizzy and crying with stress; and only together were we able to accept the risks we had taken, align around the motivations behind launching Starting Line, and work like hell to make it a reality. I told no one besides Shira and my therapist – because there were too many people who told me I was one of the city’s rising stars and I feared disrupting that mirage.
As I outlined last month, the myriad awards shows in Chicago are a sickness on our entrepreneurial community and, in my strong opinion, are directly responsible for much of the underperformance of our city’s once high flying startups. If I leave one mark on our fair city of Chicago, I hope it will be to rid our ecosystem of these pernicious events that serve mostly to promote the selfish interests of those who facilitate them.
The continual external validations for accomplishments that are unrealized and tenuous, perpetuate a cycle of denial and delusion regarding fundamental company operations. Worse, these premature external validations actually make it harder for founders to be vulnerable with their teams, their peers, and supporters, due to the fear of embarrassment and shame. Conversely, hard working but unrecognized individuals may feel overlooked and invalidated - often because the boards of “judges” are wholly unqualified to do so. There have been an unprecedented number of suicides in the entrepreneurial community in the recent years and I am convinced that the paralysis of shame is directly to blame.
Rather than continue to bemoan these awards from this blog, we’d like to put our money and our time where our mouth is:
On Monday November 18th at 6pm in River North, Starting Line will host an event called “Enough With the Damn Awards Shows.” Any operator, executive or investor, who has been nominated for any startup award over the past five years is invited to attend. Starting Line will subsidize and host an executive coach who will facilitate a discussion around how to juxtapose being vulnerable and self-aware contrasted with the need to inspire employees, recruits and peers. Food and drinks are included!
This is an experiment and we don’t know how many attendees, if any, to expect. To register, please sign up here and we will be in touch via email: https://forms.gle/S11mFePY2D8yoaZA8