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Responsibility to my employees and my clients, and despite being increasingly miserable, I was damned good at what I did - left the company in great shape and m

Responsibility to my employees and my clients, and despite being increasingly miserable, I was damned good at what I did - left the company in great shape and might even be able to be friends with cofounder again. It was the crushing responsibility that got me in the end - billions flowing through our systems, the thousands of livelihoods that directly or indirectly rely on your house of cards, unending anxiety and mistrust from clients erodes you into being anxious and not trusting yourself. It was a blast in the early years, when I was getting my hands dirty and if it all went wrong it was just my shirt to lose, but the last five years have comprised shitty politics, and I just no longer had the will to go on dealing with it - my physical health started to severely suffer about two years ago - turns out relentless stress does subtle and Bad Things to your body. I'm totally aware that I could have walked years ago, but there was always hope that it would get better, and at that point I don't think the business would have survived without me - it's only really in the last 18 months that I filled the final gaps and made myself redundant. I made the decision to leave several years ago - it's just taken time to get to the point where I could. It wasn't fun as hell, it was just hell :)

dancek 10y ago
Thanks for your comments. This is the side of entrepreneurship that rarely gets told, and you seem to have got most of the possible downsides while still keeping the company running well enough. There's a lot to learn from what you say.
Swizec 10y ago
Thanks, that was a great response. Sounds like you grew the company larger than you wanted to run. Did you have a VC monkey on your back or just realized too late what was happening and couldn't turn back? Or did something else make you grow it so big?
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  It wasn't so much a case of too big as just entrenched on a steady state trajectory, that will see the company do well into the future so long as the market doesn't move along too fast, but was fundamentally uninteresting to me. No, where things went wrong for me boiled down to me ending up in a role which comprised dealing with the stuff that nobody else wanted to deal with. My cofounder was a great orchestrator, but ran away from anything that looked emotionally hard, so I ended up just doing the drainimg stuff. We did take funding because it was supposed to be part of a strategic deal. Deal didn't pan out, so we had a fairly hands-off investor. We grew to the size we did (52 staff when I left) because the business was leaning more and more towards client service rather than technology. I wanted to take the platform to mass market, the business as a whole had just become too conservative (culturally throughout) to consider it. I found myself an entrepreneur and innovator locked in a stale process driven environment in which nothing ever really progressed or changed - which I had helped build. If I start another business it's small isolated teams all the way down. No "big company", each SBU gets supreme autonomy. Only works for certain kinds of businesses of course, but they're the interesting ones.

dancek 10y ago

Thanks for your comments. This is the side of entrepreneurship that rarely gets told, and you seem to have got most of the possible downsides while still keeping the company running well enough. There's a lot to learn from what you say.

Swizec 10y ago

Thanks, that was a great response. Sounds like you grew the company larger than you wanted to run. Did you have a VC monkey on your back or just realized too late what was happening and couldn't turn back? Or did something else make you grow it so big?

madaxe_again 10y ago
It wasn't so much a case of too big as just entrenched on a steady state trajectory, that will see the company do well into the future so long as the market doesn't move along too fast, but was fundamentally uninteresting to me. No, where things went wrong for me boiled down to me ending up in a role which comprised dealing with the stuff that nobody else wanted to deal with. My cofounder was a great orchestrator, but ran away from anything that looked emotionally hard, so I ended up just doing the drainimg stuff. We did take funding because it was supposed to be part of a strategic deal. Deal didn't pan out, so we had a fairly hands-off investor. We grew to the size we did (52 staff when I left) because the business was leaning more and more towards client service rather than technology. I wanted to take the platform to mass market, the business as a whole had just become too conservative (culturally throughout) to consider it. I found myself an entrepreneur and innovator locked in a stale process driven environment in which nothing ever really progressed or changed - which I had helped build. If I start another business it's small isolated teams all the way down. No "big company", each SBU gets supreme autonomy. Only works for certain kinds of businesses of course, but they're the interesting ones.