Staying Level-Headed in the Midst of a Fire

July 12, 2024

"I think I deleted the venue."

My heart sank. The show was less than an hour away. Guests were already lined up. And I had accidentally trashed the entire augmented reality gallery.

"Do we have a backup?"

We didn’t. Our product wasn’t public yet. With all the late nights getting ready for launch, we barely had time to slap our logo on it. Luxuries like confirmation prompts and backups were still far off.

"Can we turn off the internet?"

That made no sense. If I deleted it and everything disappeared, it was gone from the servers, and my goose was officially cooked. I was scrambling.

"Tell me we’re not completely hosed?"

We were completely hosed.

The client would be furious.
The guests would laugh at us.
Our investors would have good reason to pull out.

KEEP A LEVEL HEAD AND WORK THE PROBLEM.

Okay, it took months to build this, and now I had to rebuild an entire augmented reality sculpture garden from scratch… in about 45 minutes."I got it! I’ll just re-upload one of the 7 pieces and put it in the center of the room."No one will notice the rest of the 10,000 square foot hall is empty, right?Wasn’t the moral of "The Emperor’s New Clothes" that high-status people are afraid to speak truth to power?

WE CAN WORK WITH THAT.

...

"Good news."

"There’s a freak snowstorm in San Francisco and everyone went home?"

"No… we found a device that wasn’t connected to the network and it had a copy of the gallery on it. We’re re-uploading it now."

In the world of startups, you have to take calculated risks and let some fires burn. The challenge is knowing the difference between a mere dumpster fire and a five-alarm inferno that threatens the building. The harder part is keeping a steady hand on the wheel when the flames get hotter.

What do you think? Have you ever felt behind on every problem? Do you constantly feel like you’re in triage mode in an endless maze of new problems? How do you balance making forward progress with dedicating scarce resources toward mitigating potential risk?

And yes, we undeleted the venue, and yes, we had backups working later that same day!