The forest is on fire

My investor told me the forest was on fire and I was carrying buckets of water to individual bushes.

What I needed to bring in was the fire brigade.

It was around 2020. Perch was hard to raise money for. Hardware skepticism, a small sports market, a few 25-year-old first-time founders, and deep computer vision technology that gave investors plenty of reasons to pass. We had heard enough no's that I was close to exhausting my 100+ person investor list and running out of ideas for what to do next.

So I found other things to do.

Polish the sales deck. Clean up the financial model. Work on product strategy. All of it felt legitimate, and honestly, it was. All of it made the to-do list. But none of it was the thing.

I wasn't just busy. I was hiding.

Fundraising had no clear checkbox. No obvious next step. No guarantee that the next conversation led anywhere. It was months of ambiguity, months of hustling without a clear definition of what hustling even meant, months of hoping someone said yes, or at least introduced me to the person who would. At some point it was easier to go do something I was good at or had a clear solution.

So I carried buckets. Very effectively, I might add. That one bush was spotless. Meanwhile the forest burned. We weren't any closer to raising the money we needed.

The hardest work rarely has a checkbox. It's the six-month project with no clear next step. It's the company's hardest problems. The thing you like the least, but you're the only one that can do it. The thing you don't know how to do and aren't sure you can pull off.

You have 100 things to do at any given moment. Most of them are completable. Most of them feel like progress. The trap is filling your days with things you can finish while the most important thing sits untouched.

Avoidance is a signal. The thing you keep not starting is almost always the thing that needs you most.

Jonathan didn't tell me to stop hiding. He just named what was happening. That was enough. I buckled down, stopped optimizing our CRM 😂, and started making calls. I treated fundraising like the only thing that mattered, because it was.

The best founders, operators, or executives recognize this pattern in themselves before someone has to name it for them. They make small steps toward an ambiguous goal. They find ways to stay motivated. They do the hard thing until it's done.

For me it was always fundraising, what is it for you?