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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 l

• 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.