The months leading up to the announcement of our new company was chock full of lessons learned.  We launched Coinme on May 1st at Spitfire in Belltown during a well attended launch party, complete with our first Meetup and an entertaining expert bitcoin panel.

It was the culmination of many long days, phone calls, emails, re-designs, re-brandings, and all sorts of other seemingly frustrating things.  Below I have detailed three of which helped me realize a few things – namely the biggest risk of all is not taking a risk.

Setting a deadline is essential

Setting yourself a deadline – be it a launch party, a internal team milepost or some other marker – is the single best thing you can do to push yourself and your team to execute and actually complete what you set out to complete.  We set May 1st as our launch party, and determined the machine needed to be there, dressed in its new costume and ready to take live transactions in front of more than an hundred people.

We also – very importantly – needed to get passed through the State of Washington as an officially licensed money transmitter business before this date.  You have no idea what was required for all these pieces to come together, and before we began this process I didn’t either.  But given we had committed to launch this company, we held ourselves to the deadline and pulled through right at the end.

I have painfully seen it time and time again with other startups in Seattle… they never release their feature or finally launch their company.  Crazily, they just keep working on things.  In the end, they simply don’t set themselves a deadline to stick to so they just remain in startup purgatory. This is not the right place to be as a startup – trust me.

Being early is both good and bad

One big thing I have learned is it’s very early in the bitcoin world, probably too early for most consumers.  Most people still have no idea what it is, why they should purchase it, and why they should use it for payments.  Although the answer to those questions will be left for future posts, suffice it to say the entire world is still trying to figure it out.  Coinme, as a company, believes in the transformative nature of the technology and feel it can influence not only financial transactions but many more industries.  And again, it’s way too early to tell.

But we feel our opportunity to influence such an early industry was/is too great to pass up.  We see areas where we can help educate and inform people about the positives, negatives and in-betweens of this new cryptocurreny world.  We’d rather be early to the party than too late.

Being early to the market can be good for a startup, but it also can be not so good.  If you are too early to the market you risk spending all of your available capital without generating enough revenues (assuming at some point you need to run on revenues, not invested capital) which will ultimately end the business.   Successful businesses are able to time the market in a way where they achieve both early mover advantage and customer adoption.  One without the other spells doom for any high growth company.

Calculated risk is worth it

I touched on this last post but I feel so strongly about it I think its worth addressing again.  Taking a calculated risk – hopefully a number of them – is one of the best things entrepreneurs can do to accel their careers.  Doing what no one else is willing or ready to do places a person in a very select group of people, a group where things are created, companies are sold and millionaires are made.  Even if the venture ultimately fails, the business (or tech) community will consider the founder a leader, an innovator and a healthy risk taker.

And you know what?

That’s exactly the person investors want to invest in.  That’s who others want to follow when they take their next job and join their next company.  That’s who the media wants to cover when they write about the next generation of business leaders.

No imagine if you don’t take that risk…

Trust me, what I learned over the last few months is that the biggest risk of all is not taking a risk.