Which noodle is the best?

I love startups, and I love the noodles that always seem to go with them. My personal favorite is Maruchan Instant Lunch.

Noodles are for me the constant in the roller coaster of startup life. They are more permanent than your first idea for a new company (it always changes anyway), your office space (everything is virtual anyway) and your salary (we all know how that goes). Regardless of everything else that changes, you can always depend on a nice hot lunch for under a dollar.

Noodles bring to mind for me the romanticism, the dream of a startup. The fantasy of living in a basement, working on cool ideas that will change the world and eating something cheap and tasty to keep you going through long days and longer nights. I love that fantasy - I love startups. They are constant insanity; constant excitement; constant simultaneous pain and joy. I love how they always teeter on the edge between boundless success and looming failure.

What could possibly be more exhilarating? From the time you get that $200 Delaware LLC certificate in your mailbox you are on a liberating path. No more boss. No more endless meetings and voicemails. No more Machiavellian struggle to get promoted instead of your coworker. In a startup you can sleep in the middle of the day, go to work in your pajamas, and put whatever title you like on your business card. You can promise your friends positions as Advisors. You can promise the local bartender some Friends and Family shares from the authorized capital when you run out of cash and have had one too many.

Perhaps best, you can blog at 4:00 in the afternoon while everyone else is in some meeting in which their boss is getting Buy-In for the Action Plan and Assigning Ownership to the Team Players for the Deliverables based on their Bandwidth and making sure everyone is On The Same Page.

More later…it’s time for a nice bowl of Maruchan…