Each morning I see two shards. 

The first shard is a living monument. Day by day, floor by floor, it hurtles heavenward, like a giant redwood growing from a mass of concrete and cranes. 

The second shard is glass and shiny, and descended to us like as a gift from the gods last Tuesday evening.

The first is a symbol of evolution, growth and renewal, thrusting ever skyward, unfurling like the green shoots of economic recovery. 

The second is a chance symbol of serendipitous success. 

The first is the Shard at London Bridge, and it’s the perfect metaphor for what a start-up is like when you’re inside it: complex, messy, ugly and never-ending. 

The second is the award we received as the winner of the Travel category in the 2011 Telegraph Start-Up 100, and it’s exactly what start-ups look like from the outside.

Paddling like crazy

It’s funny how the closer you get to start-ups the more they look like goold old fashioned old hard work. 

People often say things like, “it's all about having a great idea,” they talk about “overnight success” and they speak about “entrepreneurs of genius” as though they were a race apart. 

Reality is that the most successful companies are almost all perspiration. It’s more like industrial engineering than divine inspiration. Great businesses took decades to become what they are today. The greatest often look a lot like something that’s existed in another form for years. McDonalds no more invented the hamburger, than IKEA did flat-pack assembly, or Facebook the social network. Those were the firms that got it right, who executed well, who are still executing well. 

It’s painstaking work. It takes dedication, effort and commitment. It takes long hours and intense focus. It’s about having the restless tenacity for incremental innovation. 

And just like the Shard at London Bridge, for month upon month it often feels like you’re digging foundations with precious little to show for it. Even when, finally, something—ugly and brutal at first—starts to take shape, it’s still more about power tools and hard hats than sushi and champagne. 

Which is why, just occasionally, it’s also nice to get a pat on the back.

And it’s also why we’re genuinely delighted to receive such a prestigious award from such a lovely bunch of people, and are hugely grateful for the support we’re received from the start-up community. 

Plus the new safe was looking a bit lonely until we put shiny glass shard on top of it. 

But we just try not to let it go to our heads, is all.