Andrew Lacy
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Andrew Lacy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So moving country for me or city is like this opportunity to sort of reinvent yourself if you want to. Sometimes I've used that to... reinvent my personality to some extent. I've gone from being very introverted and heads down to being a lot more extroverted and heads up. But also no one has any prior expectations about who you are and what you're going to do.
And I think that's just super liberating for taking risks.
Well, I should just say one more point about the context, because I think it's really important. I think the one thing that the US does really well is it has a expectation that people do reinvent themselves. You know, I've lived in Europe, obviously in Australia as well.
And I think if you were a lawyer and you went to your family and friends and say, hey, I'm thinking about quitting the law and learning how to program. Every single person is just going to tell you you're crazy. In America, you do that, you might still be crazy, but no one is going to tell you this. They're like, cool, right on. You're living the dream.
And I think we forget that successful career change, it's not just about having the strength and fortitude within, but it's also the societal context is so important in creating an environment where people feel really comfortable doing that. So if you're in a place where that's not the case, then I definitely encourage you to think about possibly moving.
And I think in all parts of the world that Tel Aviv, for example, and Israel is a very, I think, forward-looking and entrepreneurial place. environment in Europe. There are places like this all around the world. You don't have to come to Silicon Valley, but not every place has this environment that enables you to sort of take that leap as easily as you can in the U.S.
Well, I had gone backpacking, you know, as an Aussie around the world. So I think a lot of people would have said, oh, this is Andrew. This is a different type of backpacking. You know, he's going to head over to the US and he's going to be working instead of playing, but he'll be back, I think, was the assumption. And I haven't been back now for over 20 years.
Well, for me, the thing that I found, I didn't know too much about how to build startups inside out. There were a lot of things that were really new to me. People would say things and then I would go and like Google what the word was and try and understand what's a use case and how is that important.
But I started to learn really quickly that what's really nice about entrepreneurship is that you're sort of like blazing your own path. And that means that there's just a lot of problem solving. And what I found was that when I looked back on my career, I was studying law. Well, what is law? Law is problem solving.
How do you find the right cases to support an argument that you want to make to win the case that you're advocating for? Consulting is about going in and really trying to understand very quickly what are the issues and then suggest possible solutions. So I just found that in some ways, the startup world for me was the most concentrated problem solving environment that you could find.
It's as if you love playing chess. I felt like I got to play chess every day. There was always something that would be intellectually exciting and it didn't really matter what it was. It didn't matter that I didn't know anything about the sort of domain of the company at the time, which was like mobile and we sort of evolved into a mobile gaming company. It didn't really matter.
I didn't know too much about product management or engineering. You know, I just had this insatiable appetite for learning and applying these problem solving skills to a whole bunch of new problems. And I think for me, that was a big unlock.
I started to realize how actually I did have skills that would be really relevant to entrepreneurship and that my 10 years doing other things wasn't a complete waste of time.
A lot of scar tissue as well. Yeah. To be honest, there's just been so many. I mean, you just have to have such resilience because there's so many really low points. I never experienced more low points than I did building a company. I also never experienced as many high points. So you have this rollercoaster experience. You know, I've had low points where I've had falling outs with co-founders.
The first time you get an inbound lawsuit and you just feel like everything is over at that point. There's been times back in those early days where we were building these apps on the app store and we got kicked off the app store and we had to work to get back on.
And so all these things were just, I would go home and I would just stare at the wall and I was completely drained and just unable to feel like I could get up the next day and come to work. But you do. And then inevitably the next day is not as bad as the last day. And maybe something great happens that day and then turns into the best day.
And so there's this sort of yo-yo, which personally I feel is not great for health. probably why I'm working in healthcare now. But it's tremendous for like resilience. Because the more you go through these ups and downs, the more I've just learned that doesn't matter how bad it is today, I've seen enough days where the next day is incredible or better or affects me a lot less.
And I do think that's one of those crucibles of learning that if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship, there's no shortcut. People can tell you it. You can sort of understand it academically, but you have to go through those lows and those highs to realize that it's a roller coaster. And probably the biggest skill you learn through this is resilience.
And probably the biggest consequence for your health is a slightly higher cortisol level because you can't avoid that. It's very difficult to be completely stress-free when you're going through these big ups and downs.
I've always been a big believer in having more than one founder of the company. I think a big job of having a co-founder is to pick you up if you're not having a great day. And then when they're not having a great day, your job is to pick them up. So I think it's a very, very lonely... ride if you're taking it alone.
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