My first job out of college was writing software for $41,000 a year. I remember telling my dad over dinner that I had finally landed something, and that while it wasn't a lot, it would at least cover my expenses with a little left over. He smiled, congratulated me, and said, "You know, David, if you can't be happy with that salary now, then you won't be happy if you make 10 times that salary later."

It may have been a single sentence said in passing, but the principle behind it is something I've come back to many times throughout my career. When we first started working on Rethink, I wrote a two-year plan with fairly firm deadlines for when we'd achieve certain milestones. The plan was that, by the end of the two years, we'd have something resembling a running business. Ideally, we'd even be covering our current salaries!

But looking over the course of the time we've spent working on, building, and shaping Rethink, the successes we've had look much different to me than what I envisioned in that two-year plan. We're not as far along as I thought we would—or should—be in terms of having happy customers, and that's actually okay! What we do have is a shared vision of the kind of business we want to build. We're still working together toward that shared vision. We're still laying down one brick each day. And maybe best of all, we've had some good laughs along the way.

That’s a success I’ve taken for granted. We may not be as far along on the business side as we hoped in our earliest days, but if we can't be happy with where we are now, in this moment of the business, then we won’t be happy when we've 10x’d or 100x’d any business metrics we achieve later.