Amat Victoria Curam
I wanted to post a small personal reflection as we launch Lola today.
(If you’re an iOS user, you can download here — we’ll be getting people off the waitlist as quickly as we can! We’re also answering questions over on Product Hunt).
The last few weeks I have continued to come back to the Latin phrase “Amat Victoria Curam.”
The Parent-Teacher association gift to graduating seniors at International Academy was a blanket. My friend Neil designed the blanket for our graduation year, and included this phrase. The blanket still sits at the end of my bed, and when I make the bed, I use this phrase to set the tone for the day.
- At the time, he told me it meant “through pain comes victory,” which felt fitting after the four grueling years of International Baccalaureate prep.
- A more careful translation is “victory comes to those who take pains.”
- My personal interpretation is “you will do well if you show up and try to get a little better, every single day.”
For our team, this launch is the result of showing up and doing the work every single day for nearly a year. For me personally, it’s also a culmination of the work I put into the last two years of my career.
Two years ago, I was still working at Kickstarter. I’d hoped to eventually be employee #1, or to help build a product team. I am lucky, and get to do both here at Lola. I work with an incredible team, and incredible founders. That sounds lovely and exciting on social media, but it doesn’t escape me that the majority of my time was still showing up and working every day.
I worried that by going to HBS, I might never get a product job again. That’s the thing we always portray as happening in technology — an MBA is a “waste of time” or “too high of an opportunity cost.” This was compounded by the fact that while I was at HBS, my life was literally (1) go to class (2) go home and sit on the couch until it was time to go to sleep. Yet I kept doing it. Looking back, I can say that all of the effort that went into showing up at HBS every day mattered. I am glad I did it.
One year ago, when I first started interning at Blade, we weren’t working on Lola. I was a “market research MBA intern.” I showed up every day even though I didn’t have a team working on my project, and knew nothing about market research. Then I decided engineering would be more helpful and started writing email scraping code. Then I started planning travel for people in the office using iMessage. I tried a lot of random stuff, as you do in early stage startups. Most days were just like that: showing up and doing work.
Today, we are launching, and that’s exciting. Tomorrow we will still be here, making the product better. So, today we launch, and just like every other day, I think “Amat Victoria Curam.”
