The idea is half the battle, right? I don't know who said that, but I do know they were wrong. When we went through a nearly six-month-long process raising our seed round of venture capital, we thought that was the hard part. Wrong again.
The hardest part has been creating and growing a team to help us make our vision come to life. Finding talented, creative, and hard-working individuals willing to put in long hours, work nights and weekends, and get in productive disagreements with has been the most difficult task of all. But also, the most rewarding.
I've watched this team grow from four co-founders getting ready to quit their day jobs to a bustling team of 13. We've hired interns who have become full-time employees. We've hired former co-workers from our previous companies. We've hired fresh college graduates. We've hired developers with years of experience.
Our team is unique and diverse, but its members all fall perfectly into our constantly growing and evolving culture.
At UpTo, we created a culture full of trust and freedom. The rules are easy: There are none. No set hours. No vacation policy. Work from home if you like. Travel to Antarctica. It doesn't matter. We work hard and get our work done while still having fun. And that's the most important part.
We launched in the Apple App Store a little over a year ago. Looking back at the company, the app, and the culture in March of 2012, things are unrecognizable. We're a completely different everything, and that's the beauty in what we created.
Life is fluid and constantly changing. Our product has changed and evolved because of the culture we have created. Not the other way around.
A college senior built an incredible Android app from the ground up, and watching him work together with the team and learn outside of the classroom was one of our most rewarding experiences. We've provided an environment in which the most valuable takeaway is the skills our team members are developing.
This isn't to say that creating a company and a kick-ass culture happened without growing pains.
UpTo 2.0 has taken longer to design, build, brand, and launch than we would have liked. And cutting "must-have" features from the to-do list and moving them to 2.1 has been difficult.
But we've grown to trust one another. We're all incredibly different from each other, and for a co-founder, giving up responsibility is difficult. It's our growing team that makes everything a little bit easier.
Entire projects are handed off, designed, and executed, and the results are mind-boggling. I've helped to create a culture in which 13 individuals work really hard because they are having fun.
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