Just keep swimming – but only in the direction you want

Back in 2010, I was busy running my property management company, Park Street Estates, and doing property development through Innova Kapital. Even though I had studied mathematics at Cambridge, the extent of my technical ability and workload was creating Excel spreadsheets for cashflows and budgets. Even this was quickly taken away from me by my business partner who turned out to be better at it. The one thing I seemed to know was that there was no way that I could do an online startup, because I had not spent the past decade learning to program and make exciting things on the internet.

In my mind, I had this assumption that only genius computer science majors did amazing things in technology, and because I had missed out on this experience, much though I wanted it more than anything else in the world, that opportunity was not available to me. Every day in the office was a bit of a drag. Nonetheless, due to serendipitously meeting a few other guys, and based around a problem that had been bugging me for years, we created 42tasks.com – three years ago there was nothing out there that would allow small teams to collaborate on their tasks, and for the manager to be able to guide and oversee them. Certainly nothing with good functionality and a reasonable price range. A tiny bit of investment and some offshore developers in Uzbekistan later, and we had a product that was, at least to me, incredibly useful. We had team meetings on how to improve the UX, without actually knowing what UX was, and at the end of the meeting we would send a brief off to Uzbekistan, and the product update would arrive, a month later, looking completely different to what we envisaged. We must have been the most uncompetitive startup in London.

Throughout this time, slowly I started messing around with some basic coding. A bit of plug and play HTML to customise my original Tumblr blog, and then a bit more to customise this WordPress one. Some simple coding through Codeacademy. I went back to Cambridge for another year of mathematics, and spent most of it programming statistical applications into Matlab and R. All of this was in my spare time – I was still running companies, and none of this coding was relevant to any of them. But what it was doing was taking away that unreasonable belief that I was trapped in a career path that I didn’t want. With every month that passed, my knowledge and my confidence improved. I found myself comfortably talking with other developers, and building out small things for myself. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Last year, I finally knew that I was ready – not as a technical founder, but as a technically knowledgeable non-technical founder. I knew how to run a good startup. I understood the ecosystem and the processes involved. I had an idea. But I needed a team. Fast-forward a brutal year of networking and I have the best team I could wish for. Every morning is a joy, and by the end of every day we achieve great things. I couldn’t ask for more. But sitting back and accepting the status quo is exactly what this blog post is against. So this Easter I wanted to see what I could create, technically, and by myself. So I present to you HyperlinkedIn – a two day project to solve a problem that’s been bugging me for years. A one man startup in a weekend.

If we push ourselves to destroy the assumptions we all have about what we can and cannot do, then doing great things in general becomes easier. With time, as we succeed in all the challenges we give ourselves, success becomes second nature in all aspects of our life. We have much to learn from Dory. She missed one very important point though – only dead fish go with the flow. So just keep swimming. Always keep swimming. Just make sure it’s in a direction you choose yourself.

Find out more on the about Ivan Mazour page.
And watch Ivan Mazour's TEDx Talk - "Why we shouldn't be scared of sharing our personal data".