33/40 - Hustle Standard Time

Shortly after moving to NYC, I became an addict. While I'd dabbled in Dallas, moving to NYC put me closer to the source and all of the other junkies.

I became addicted to Hustle and I didn't hide this fact from anyone. Hell, I developed a whole hashtag around it - #HustleStandardTime - a hashtag I would post any time I was in the back of an Uber on my way to the airport before 6am.

As a friend would later tell me, "Basically every time I saw that hashtag with the pre-6 am time stamp, I heard you say, "You are a lazy bastard and I am better than you."

That wasn't the goal, but it was the outcome for a lot of my first years in NYC.

I originally started calling it Hustle Standard Time when I was commuting back and forth between NYC and San Francisco with Waze. I was expected to be in the Palo Alto office a week a month. But when spending that much time on the West Coast I realized that I was incapable of sleeping until my alarm went off. If I rolled over and saw that it was 5 am, I knew that there were a lot of people in NYC that had already been to the gym, had a cup of coffee, and were hustling. I immediately would pop out of bed and start my day on EST. Then when I was in the office, I'd be pushing through on meals and meetings like I was a native Silicon Valley bro. Then at night, I'd have team events and partner dinners and finally, go to be at bedtime PST.

That was when I coined HST for Hustle Standard Time. A time that only someone who took pride in working harder than everyone else could operate on.  

I used the word Hustle way more than I needed to. But eventually, people started to use it to talk about me and that was the beginning of a long run of opportunities to be the go-to hustler for start-ups of all shapes and sizes. I once heard a wise old start-up person say,

"Every great company has three distinct people: a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler."

I learned my ability to work from anywhere at any time, but also to sleep on demand no matter what time zone, lent itself to being that guy on the team. At Gowalla, my first startup experience, the two co-founders both had young kids under the age of 5. When speaking opportunities arose that was longer than a day trip and not make or break needing the Cofounding CEO or CTO, they'd send me. I traveled to Australia to speak at the Sydney Opera House, I went to Argentina with the founder of TOMS to give out shoes, I traveled to Moscow and the UAE, I traveled to Europe almost as frequently as I did to California. I averaged 164 days on the road a year for a decade straight.

At one point, the head bartender of the fancy restaurant in Terminal 2 at SFO saw me so often, that when I'd walk up, she'd say, "The usual Andy?" and I'd respond with, "Thank you, Katherine, how are the kids." Moments later my steak, cooked medium-rare, a side of broccoli, and a favorite bottle of wine were placed in front of me, likely for the 3rd time that month.

It was one heck of a time in my life and while it later led to mental health challenges and broken relationships, in those moments, it was some of the most fun I'd ever had. I had no idea how much capacity I had until I did everything in my power to find that edge and dance on it.  Some of the connections I mad