Burning the Boats

It’s legend* that Cortez, upon reaching Vera Cruz, burned his ships so there was no way for him and his crew to retreat. It was all-or-nothing from then on out.

My last post (back in July, #blogfail) was about the challenges we faced consulting while building our startup (then called Enforcery, now renamed to Contactually). We were starting to get into a pretty good rhythm of ensuring constant progress while consulting. We still weren’t moving as fast as we want to, and the little time we were able to cut out towards Contactually was spent more on maintenance and frustration than to actual progress. The context-switching was becoming a real problem.

So last week, we made the decision to burn the boats. We’re wrapping our consulting work, joining 500 Startups and heading out to CA for a few months, and going all in on our team, and our idea.

Now is the time to focus.

Already that decision has been a gamechanger for our team. Watch what we’re going to pull off.

* The actual story was slightly different. It’s more commonly held that Cortez burned all but one of his ships to stave off a mutiny. But when did we let facts stop a good story?