Mistakes You Should Never Make
I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had almost no money left, and that it was all my fault. On the way, my co-founder and our CTO stopped me and said “I’m resigning. And I’m going to tell the team why.” He then told me that he had lost trust in me as a CEO and as a person. And our third co-founder, a friend of mine for 11 years, was resigning too. Having slept only an hour the night before, I could barely process the news.
I had hit rock bottom.
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz says “nearly every company goes through life-threatening moments… it’s so common that there is an acronym for it, WFIO, which stands for ‘We’re Fucked, It’s Over.’” He estimates that...