🏆 our best asset at Kosmik
It took YEARS for us to get right.
Every Friday, we send an email that details what we released in Kosmik during the week, what we’re working on next week, and a little note of anything that’s been top of mind.
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Our team is what I’m most proud of at Kosmik. It was built over many years and, as of now, Kosmik employs 14 people. In the lifetime of the company, only 1 person quit and 2 didn’t make it past the trial period.
When you run a start up, you’re at a disadvantage when recruiting. You can’t offer the best salaries, the stock you attribute to “match” the salary they could have gotten elsewhere can go to 0 in a day, and the benefits won’t be as good as in a big company.
But I can think of 3 reasons to work at a startup despite all of that: ownership, freedom and challenge.
When you join a young company, even as a junior hire, you can expect to have leverage from the start and to gain more leverage as the company grows. You can have true ownership and participate in key decisions. You’ll have the freedom to explore a variety of solutions, to learn a lot of new things and (hopefully) you’ll be in a team where vertical management will not be needed for a long time. Finally, you’ll work on very challenging items, probably on tight deadlines. This isn’t for everyone and the startup life can wear you down quite fast — but I don’t think many other work environments offer as many upsides.
Finding the right people (emphasis on right - a single bad hire can set you back 6 months) and convincing them to join your team is only Step 1 as a founder. Startups have a number of ways to disappear: lack of product market-fit, lack of focus, lack of money. I suspect a less discussed cause of startup death, but a very common one, is the inability to retain good talent in challenging times.
Hard times at an early stage company can eat you alive. It’s one thing when you’re a founder, it’s another when you’re an employee. No one owes you their time or employment. People have their own personal goals, career ambitions, and tolerance.
As a seed stage company, we’ve been through all the turbulence you can imagine. Strong growth followed by meagre months, disappointing conversion rates, a very unclear value proposition, missed deadlines, postponed funding rounds, and more.
When you go through these periods, your team will inevitably feel that the advantages of the startup life now appear in a much less flattering light. All the “positive” things we’ve mentioned above will now manifest in a different way:
ownership → you are responsible for the delay in this key feature.
freedom → you should have prioritized things in a different, more efficient way
challenges → you knew what you were getting yourself into when you joined.
(These examples are of course the toxic way to address issues but I’ve seen them play out often in companies under a great amount of stress and pressure).
This is where the co-founders and early hires are key. Pressure should be contained at the top if you want the team to thrive. Pressure from the board, the investors, and customers should be communicated, but only if they’re accompanied by a way to handle it or a key action item that can involve the team: “the board is worried because our demo to closing rate is low, we suspect that it comes for X, let’s discuss how we move some items around to fix it this week instead of next month”.
This is how you can turn those situations into an opportunity to strengthen your team and build resilience — and we’re speaking from experience.
In 2021, Kosmik experienced a bad cash crunch. I was cornered with no clear way to save the company. I had begun to raise an extension round but the team seemed too big for a flailing company, many investors were advising me to cut spendings and divide the number of employees by 2.
I told those investors that making those cuts now would actually reduce the runway in the short term (because you have to pay severance plus all the untaken paid time off) and make the company less viable in the long term. The team, I argued, was actually the one thing we had built well. If we were to shrink the team now I would have to go on a hiring spree after the fundraise and we would be back to square one. I also insisted that the team was our best way to save the company.
They told me to prove it.
I went to the team, assembled everybody around the kitchen table and I told them several things:
We have 90 days of runway so now would be the proper time to wind down the company if we want to do it properly.
We have 500k committed for a bridge round, I’m confident I can double or triple that.
To do it I have to lengthen the runway by another 60-90 days, the board is advising me to cut spendings and the only significant expense we have is salaries so they’re advising me to fire half the team.
I don’t want to do it (see above) and I may have a plan to save the whole team but it would mean a great sacrifice for all of us: we all take a pay-cut (a third to half depending on the position/current salary).
Once the round is closed we will make it up to you in some way.
The whole team unanimously agreed to take the pay cut. This was a significant risk because, in France, your benefits are calculated on your last three months of salary. If I failed to close the round the whole team would have suffered even more.
Thankfully the round closed, gave us a good amount of runway and we were able to restore the salaries and even raise them. This experience bonded us a lot and made it possible to work on even more challenging things, it suppressed fear in some ways and proved us that we could rely on one another.
I think that without those traumatic (but ultimately formative) moments in Kosmik’s life, something as significant as a profound technological change, like the one we decided last week, could have resulted in some people resigning. Saying “we need to change the back-end profoundly” amounts to significant changes in the “upside” categories we mentioned above: ownership, freedom and challenge. Those decisions can change the rules of the game and be enough for some people to look for a new job where those parameters are more in line with their goals and aspirations — which is totally understandable.
But because we know that what we ultimately like is working together through changes, as hard as they are and as challenging as they will be — we work on them with the same eagerness as when we started the company.
I hope you liked this peak behind the curtain. Our team is the most important thing we have at Kosmik and we are impatient to show you everything we’ve been working on!
What we’ve been working on this week
Our next release, which will be released next Tuesday!
Like our latest release, this version focuses mainly on making your experience with Kosmik better. We implemented a few nice-to-haves like this delightful theme switcher that will allow you to use Kosmik in dark/light mode regardless of your system appearance.
What we’re working on
Because working on one version isn’t enough, we’ve also almost completed Kosmik 2.10. This version will contain a highly requested feature that has been under development for a long time: arrows!
(We know, it’s been too long).
Arrows will have everything you’d expect: drag to create, change the colour, line width, style, etc). We’ve designed Kosmik connectors in a slightly different way than other programs. Instead of snapping to the edge of the object you can point directly at a precise spot within the frame.
Here’s a quick demo, let us know what you think!
Until next week —
Paul.