I looked back at 2020, so I’ll share my reflections.

First Year of Founding, First-Year Entrepreneur

In March 2020, I left my previous startup and started a company as a co-founder.

My first year as a founder was enriched by the experiences I gained at my previous startup over about 9 years, from pre-founding to Series E phase.

Though cliché, I incorporated the good points and avoided anti-patterns that I wanted to use as negative examples.

Development

As a co-founder and director with a software engineering background, I thought I would be writing lots of code at least during the first year of founding, but looking back, I had less time to write code myself than I initially expected.

I think this is entirely due to successful engineering hiring.

Back Office

One new challenge was being entrusted with the administrative departments (back office, corporate, IT) in addition to product development.

Since I had no experience with back office work, I read through books and started by trial and error, but like development, hiring went well and I was soon able to delegate the actual work.

IT / Corporate Engineering

While we need to build a robust system, one of 2020’s achievements was successfully hiring someone part-time through Twitter.

We’ll quickly bring our IT systems up to public company standards as well.

HR / Hiring and Organization Building

We became a team of 12 people total, all through referral hiring.

Since we want to more than double the organization next year, I want to continue being uncompromising and particular about hiring.

While being mindful of organizational development contexts, we have suitable members on the HR team, so I want to delegate to them.

Director, Management

I spent the year constantly asking myself “What’s the best way for an engineer-background director to move?”

Since the founding representative director was on their second startup, we had no trouble with seed round financing at all, and I was grateful to start in an advantaged environment.

I found myself in a situation where I had to practice what I thought “If I were the manager, I would do this” at my previous job, with no room for excuses.

I’ve made decisions after careful consideration, but next year I want to increase both the quantity and speed of decision-making by increasing my reading and input.

Toward 2021

My personal summary is that we successfully built the organization during the seed stage.

My theme for 2021 is to continue laying the organizational foundation while building the business foundation. Simply put, these two things are everything, so if we can build both organization and business, everything should go well.

That’s all from the Gemba. Please continue supporting us next year.