I’m bossy. Very, very bossy.

At least, I assume I must be. Because I have the bad habit of taking increasingly demanding leadership roles in any organization with which I get involved.

Take, for example, the gym, CrossFit NYC. As one of the four founders, my role was largely fiscal (bankrolling the first year of startup) and ceremonial (teaching a handful of classes each week). But, with some recent personnel drama, and the growing sense that CFNYC could actually be very, very big (given our explosive membership growth over the past few months), it seems I’m now stepping things up, and becoming Managing Director.

Which is on top of Cyan, and everything we’re working on here. I haven’t pimped Cyan’s activities much of late, as after an over-slow 2007 I’ve been waiting for significant, concrete progress rather than vaporware to point to. But suffice it to say that we’re making surprisingly big strides on a lot of fronts – from a five-film slate to a $200m film hedge fund – that should make 2008 a considerably more exciting year.

And by ‘exciting’, I mainly mean ‘time consuming’. Two full time jobs, planning a wedding, heavy drinking. I think I’m going to have to go back to giving up sleeping and going to the bathroom to make it all fit.

Though poor Jess is now laid out with a cold (caught on the tail end of our immuno-supressed flu state; she’s predicting AIDS next on the rotation), I’m (for the time being, at least) feeling good, and working hard.

I am, however, pulling out my hair a bit on CrossFit NYC’s ongoing space search. In short, thanks to explosive membership growth, we’re now bursting at the seams in our current location, and though we’ve been searching hard for a suitable new home, we’ve mostly been coming up blank.

Our requirements:

• 3000 sft or more;
• $10-12k a month;
• allowed to build in showers / locker rooms;
• able to jump around and drop weights without bothering downstairs neighbors (whether that means basement or ground floor, or just an upper-floor light industrial space);
• and, centrally located with good subway access (we’re currently at 38th and 6th, which is just about perfect).

A laundry list, I know. But, if you have any hot leads, I’d hugely appreciate an email, as I’m pretty sure bald isn’t my look.

A few months ago, I had lunch with my friend Daniel Adamson, who runs the very intriguing (to me, at least) Blue Funds. The company, in short, manages a family of mutual funds that invest in public companies that both ‘act blue’ (meet a list of social and environmental responsibility requirements) and ‘give blue’ (give at least 50% of their campaign contributions to democrat candidates). It turns out – both in historical back-testing, and the first year of actual investing – that these companies handily outperform the S&P. So, they’re succeeding on sort of a triple bottom line.

Anyway, he spent lunch telling me about his company and what they have planned for the next year or so, and I told him about what we’re doing at Cyan, the First Cut Film Series, and some bigger institutional financing things we’re brewing up (both a tax-arb production fund, and a capital-protected distribution fund).

By the end of lunch, we both wanted leave our own companies to work for the other’s. Which, it seems, happens almost every time I meet up with another young entrepreneur.

The reason, I think, is that entrepreneurs tend to thrive on hope, on possibility. We get excited about new ideas, about big-picture innovation. And when you’re hearing about someone else’s projects, all you have to think about is that fun, strategic, high-level stuff.

But then you go back to your own company, where you have to worry about cash-flow and execution and all of the detail that actually makes or breaks a company. Which, frankly, often sucks in the doing, the day to day.

I still haven’t figured out a way to reconcile the two. But I have, at least, penciled in a few times a week for me to sit down and formally re-pitch myself Cyan’s plans, the big-picture fun stuff that we’re trying to achieve. It doesn’t spare me the pain of executing, but it does, most of the time, get me re-excited about why I’m doing it in the first place.

This clause was in a contract Cyan just finished drafting:

14) Headings. The headings of the paragraphs of this Note are inserted for convenience only and shall not be deemed to constitute a part hereof.

We therefore changed the clause to read:

14) Fishsticks. The headings of the paragraphs of this Note are inserted for convenience only and shall not be deemed to constitute a part hereof.

I am embarrassed to say we then laughed so hard as to almost wet ourselves.

Yes, we are losers.

Everything, apparently, hinges on everything else. Which is how a handful of minor delays and small problems can cascade their way to a slew of disasters that consume months with non-stop firefighting.

Or, at least, that’s how things have been going here of late. Fortunately, looks like all the flames are nearly extinguished, and I’m still holding my breath. Here’s hoping I end this all no worse scathed than thickly covered with soot.

Back to it.

Update!

As hoped, I survived this latest stretch of standard startup-wrangling disaster with company, sanity and personal relationships all fortunately and firmly in tact. Regular blogging now to continue apace.

People often ask me what I actually do as CEO of a small company. In short: fundraise. First for seed capital to turn the notional company into something real. Then for more capital to keep the young company moving ahead while its expenses still outpace its income. And then, once the company turns profitable, for capital to fund expansion, to underwrite the large new projects that drive growth.

And, frankly, fundraising sucks. Not least of all because you have to ask people to give you large sums of money. But also because, even when they want to, you’re still a far, far back priority to the main concerns of their own lives.

So, in short, you wait. You wait for emails and calls and faxed contracts. And you balance a ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’ tack with the knowledge that if you pester them too much, they’re more likely to wash their hands of the whole thing, rather than cough up cash.

Even once papers are signed, things are often no better: by then, you’re waiting for their wire to arrive, obsessively reloading the online banking site.

And, the whole time, bills pile up, along with demands for that still-not-arrived money, money that you can’t really make arrive any faster than it is. But, since you’re the middle man, the face that they see, people tell you again and again to do the impossible: to make all of this process, which moves on investor time, move instantly, on their time instead.

That said, if it’s the film business, then at least once every couple of months you get to walk down a red carpet somewhere. So it’s all worth it. It’s all worth it. Or, at least, that’s what you repeat to yourself, like a mantra, as you reload, reload, reload Chase and WaMu.com.