Celebrate the Wins
Your team needs to see the wins you've already moved past
“Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter,’ and I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.’ I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.” - Jeff Bezos
Founders operate ahead of the company. That’s the job. Seeing around two corners, making sense of the noise, setting the vision for a future that doesn’t exist yet. And while early-stage companies aren’t as predictable as Amazon, the principle holds: you’re usually working on things that haven’t happened yet.
That Series A that is closing next week? You’ve spent the last 6 weeks living and breathing decks, coffee chats, term sheet negotiations and diligence, all while trying to close more customers. That major product launch? You first came up with the concept when you conceived of the company. The critical hire who finally signed? You started courting them a year ago.
By the time any major moment lands, it doesn’t feel like a ‘win’. It feels like an inevitability, something set in motion long ago. You have processed these already and moved on.
Your team hasn’t.
The Context Gap
As a founder, you have context nobody else has. You’ve been planning and playing three moves ahead while everyone else has been executing move one. To you, milestones are confirmation that the plan is working. To your team, they can mean something entirely different.
They’re proof that the long hours mattered. That the risk was worth taking. That the sacrifices make sense, not just internally, but to the people in their lives who ask, “How’s work going?”
When wins go unacknowledged, that story gets harder to tell.
Take a Beat
This isn’t to say you should manufacture celebrations or be constantly congratulating people. But when something meaningful takes place, something that once kept you up at night, pause and mark the occasion.
Ring a gong. Send a company-wide Slack message. Call an unscheduled all-hands. Go out to dinner. Take a team photo. Create a small piece of swag tied to the moment. One portfolio company wired a gong to Slack with a Raspberry Pi so every hit sent a message to the entire team, remote included.
The action doesn’t matter.
The pause does.
These moments become the stories your team tells about the company. “Remember when we closed that impossible customer?” “Remember when we finally shipped V2?”
That shared history carries teams through the inevitable rough patches. It becomes part of the culture, evidence that progress happens, even when it’s not necessarily obvious day to day. And remember, as the company progresses what qualifies as a milestone will too. One day you’ll be celebrating a $1M quarter. The next you’ll be marking a $1M day.
Celebrate the wins. You’ll thank yourself later.
What are fun ways you’ve celebrated the wins with your team?
So real :)
"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things."