Part 2: My new life in a start-up

What have I done!? Did I make a huge mistake? (Yes I know, very 'clickbaity' but read on).

Given today is my 2 two year anniversary at Keyzy it's unforgivable not to finally finish part 2!

In Part 1 of this long overdue spillage of thoughts I talked about the reasons why I quit banking to join a start-up. None of those reasons related to what it was like to actually work for a start-up. I didn't know, and that was part of the big risk. So did I make a mistake? What is it like, and looking back over the last two years, do I wish I'd stayed at LBG?

To answer that I'll pick up where I left off there when it was 'all change'! I'd quit my job at Lloyds, accepted at Keyzy, my dad had passed away and my wife told me she was pregnant, all in the space of a few weeks. What was I thinking rocking the boat at this stage in my life? Emotionally I couldn't have been more discombobulated. I was sad to have left my friends behind at Lloyds at the end of a huge era of my life. Excited and scared to be starting something completely new at Keyzy. Buried in grief after the loss of my old man. Yet somehow overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a dad myself. I nearly exploded.

Going from massive corporate bank Lloyds Banking Group to tiny PropTech start up Keyzy was a gear change to say the least. To spell it out, I'm literally going to list all the thing that are different. Not necessary better or worse. Just not the same. Here we go:

1. Network. LBG is a huge bank and I had worked in almost every corner of it. Walking around any Lloyds building was a lot of fun as there was always someone to say hi to or catch up with on something current or way back when you worked together. My business unit was sometimes 200 people strong! Just so many human connections and stakeholders. At Keyzy there are seven of us. Yep, that's it, just seven. Two founders Jeremy Matallah and Simon Groll , two tech bros Akshay Bedre and Saif Khan , a Customer Success specialist Aisha I. and our Customer Underwriting and Affordability Lead Andrew Thomson . In other words, my professional network at Keyzy was 100% complete on day one! That's both limiting and hugely simplified from a working environment perspective.
2. Influencing. At LBG if I want to influence the CEO or Chairman...well let's face it, that wasn't going to happen. Influencing the big decision makers was hard. This is frankly a product of any large organisation as complex and busy as a high street bank. It sort of needs to be that way. As much as we tried to change the culture, ultimately there was only so many hours in the day for a big boss to help their people out, and there were 60,000 or me! I'm oversimplifying things I know, but the fact was that you couldn't just start a project. You needed 'buy-in' from dozens of people. You needed funding which could sometimes take months or even years to obtain as a Product Owner. Yes, there was plenty of autonomy at LBG in many scenarios, but often still within a complex web of approvals and support/safety mechanisms. At Keyzy I stand up and say "Hey boss, I want build this new thing." We grab a coffee, we chat it through with the team and agree what's next. Done. I mean, not exactly like that as sometimes my ideas are stupid and dangerous, but you know what I mean. Small team and I'm sitting two meters from the big bosses all day every day.
3. Air Cover. Very closely linked to the above, at the big bank you have 'air cover'. This means there's almost always someone in the layer above you (yes I'm obsessed with hierarchy, I know it's not always command and control, but stay with me here) usually your boss, who can protect you from the slings and arrows flying around that distract you. Sometimes, having a boss running pass interference (NFL reference, look it up) was the best thing they could do to help you succeed. They could also help lift you out into the 'open' if the coast was clear. I'm talking in metaphors now aren't I? Here's my point, at Keyzy there's no air cover. Again, the boss is sitting two meters away! If I screw up (which happens often), they know about it, they have to. On the other hand, it's not like there's any worry. A small team like ours is far less intimidating than a big org. Maybe I don't need air cover. In fact, I'd rather not in this smaller scenario.
4. Jack of all. It's very rare at large institution to have your day to day cross disciplines, skill sets, business areas, industries, locations, products and professions. More often than not, at my level of seniority (alright Adam you have a chip on your shoulder, we get it) you would be focussed on a main area. For example, I was a Product Owner in Machine Learning for Retail Consumer Products. Profession/skill, discipline, business area. My days were varied and I was never bored. But it's not like one day I was managing a backlog and the next I was installing cash machines in branches. You focussed, and rightly so. I was able to craft my profession, deepen my skills and knowledge, and build something in one area. Great fun! At Keyzy, yes you guessed it, it's different. Here are the things if done working as a Product Manager at a start up that would have been someone else's job at Lloyds: designed websites and logos, manned the webchat to talk to customers, reviewing customer applications, emptied the bins, moved offices (like actually lifting the fridge myself), negotiate house purchases, installing smoke and fire alarms in tenant's kitchens and hallways, key cutting, reviewing building surveys, ordering house repairs, designing and ordering corporate branded merch, building our CRM from scratch, design and run social media campaigns and the list goes on. It's not like you would never do this stuff at LBG, but was less likely to happen. It's a blessing and a curse. On one hand you can purely focus on your job title, but on the other you can feel like you own the customer journey and have a physical hand in it from when they see you on Google, all the way until you put the keys in their hands. Some days I like it, some days I don't.
5. Speed. This one is probably quite obvious so I'll keep it short. Oil tankers take longer to change direction than jet-skis. Know what I mean? Carlo Giovine and I wrote a slide on this once for LBG execs. It's a great analogy! How long does it take to come up with a new product feature, fund it, prioritise it, design it, test it, deploy it to customers for use and get back into the feedback and refinement cycle? There were some pretty damn impressive teams at Lloyds smashing down doors and getting these things done at shocking speeds, depending on size and complexity. So we're talking about on average here. Start-ups have 1,000 fewer touch points and complexities to worry about, so we can go faster and do same day idea inception to deployment if we really need to (I can now hear my founders saying: "you've never gone that fast in your life Adam". Touché). So yea I'm exaggerating. Things are faster because they can be. Sometimes too fast and you barely have time to think. But iteration and fast failure is truly faster. I didn't keep that short did I?
6. Uncertainty. 90% of startups fail . Yikes! Even the biggest financial crisis in a generation wasn't enough to sink LBG. It's not to say that my job was always 100% safe at Lloyds, but the risk factor around job security was never tied to the survival of the bank. If Keyzy doesn't succeed, I'll be looking for work. But I knew this going in. My wife is surprised at my shift in mindset as I spent a lot of my career valuing the security of working for a big, stable and (in the CEO's own words) "boring" retail bank. Then I was suddenly super happy to join a company with no guarantees about the future. Something had shifted in the way I viewed work. Even while things were at their most unstable in my life (new baby, grief, economy, etc) I still wanted to put myself in a position of risk. I wanted a different kind of fulfilment that suited my life now. It was a bit backwards as it's more common for people to leave the high risk job and join the low risk one when they need stability and certainty. But I've always been a bit backwards. Long story short, I'm uncomfortable with uncertainty, so I've decided to expose myself to it to see what happens. You never know right?

Ok, let's try and get to a conclusion here.

Would it have been a mistake staying at LBG? No, I don't think so. There's just too many things that suited me at the big bank to call it a mistake. I may have regretted not taking the leap, but I'd still be carrying all the benefits of being there now. Does that make it a mistake to have joined the start up? Also no. It's been such a fun and fulfilling two years that I wouldn't trade. It was a good decision. I'm happy with it. We're doing really well and I know we're here for the long-term. I miss Lloyds, but that's ok, it means it was worth it to work there.

I'll leave it there. Let me know if you have any questions.

P.s. they even let me bring my son to work!