Earlier this week I had a perfect storm of things go wrong at work, any one of which would have been likely to infuriate me on a normal day. Combine them all together in a row, thrown in a quick round trip flight on United Airline (motto: You Think K-Mart Has Lousy Service?) and then add in several off-diet expensive-but-yucky airport food meals that made me gain three pounds. Result: One Ready To Explode Guy.

Bad Temper = Bad Decisions

I'm about as old as a dinosaur and one of the things I've learned is that I make bad decisions when I'm mad. Really really bad decisions. It's not that I haven't made good decisions when I was tee'd off, I have. It's that the ration of good:bad decreases. (Or increases, if that is what I meant, I have never properly understood how to say ratios.)

Worse Ever Bad Decision Made When Mad

At an earlier startup we negotiated a $12M round with a fund-of-funds that wanted to get some exposure to the boom in tech. As this was right before the bust, you may assume that they got more exposure than they really wanted. But at the time everyone and their grandmother's bond fund was buying into tech startup.

So we negotiated a deal with these cats, and while they were not VC's per se, they were very very smart and tough people, who checked us out from top to bottom, inside and out. Like seeing the doctor after 40, but with a spreadsheet instead of a glove. At the end of several months of work, and tens of thousands of dollars of legal bills (on my side alone, who knows what they spent) we had a rough draft of a contract and were just fiddling with valuation and board seats ($20M or $18.5M, 3 seats or 4.) I must admit that I was negotiating pro-forma and really was already getting a better valuation than I'd hoped and losing fewer board seats.

Then, after it was all settled, I got the final copy of the contract and they'd slipped in warrants for 15% of the company.

What you can't see is what signs he's making with his paws.

I even slept on my answer, thinking that would help me be more reasonable and let me re-enter negotiations.

Not As Smart As I Thought I Was

Because, you see, I'd confused letting some time lapse to letting my temper subside. So the next day, feeling deceived, I called them up and read them the riot act and, basically, told them where they could stick 12 million one dollar bills folded up into tiny little points. Not that you could have fit them all in there, but the piledriver I suggested they rent might have packed a few more in.

Now, this is a very human response to being systematically deceived, but it was foolish on many levels.

Wait, Deceived?

Yes, well, someone doesn't come up with a perfectly worded 4 page section in a contract overnight, with full references to other sections special provisions. So they'd always been planning on putting this section into the document right before signing. And, thus, I was deceived and duped into spending the things that are most scarce in a startup:

• Money
• Time
• Attention
• Energy

Why It Was Foolish

Well, turning down the money because they would be bad business partners would have been fine, assuming one had other options (we suddenly didn't) but turning it down mad was foolish because:

• I burned bridges. I have those guys in my contacts list so I can avoid them because I can only imagine how stupid they thought I was.
• We needed the money. Knowing what I know today, I would have taken the money. Could I have come to that conclusion if I was calm and focused? Maybe.
• Their plan was to manipulate me. They weren't making a mistake in slipping that stuff in. The only reaction where I could have still been in control was if I'd remained calm. So they won as soon as I got mad and started reacting without calm, deep, and mature thought.

Getting Smarter

Now I know that time does not equal calm, and I have learned to recognize when I'm stomping around mad, or even just sitting working on strategy stuff in a rapid simmer. So today I have restricted myself to working on the administrative items that I hate but have to be done: review of next year's health care plan, lease renewal review, reading all the inbound customer comments for the week (yes, I still do that), etc, etc. All things where I might take a to-do, or have to get something done, but all transactional and places where even a bad decision is not disastrous.

And if I'm not better by Monday, I'll know to keep myself out of the game until my head is ready to go there and do a good job.