Dimitar is the VP and General Manager of CrossBeam, the world's first and most powerful partner ecosystem platform. Dimitar is also a two-time Founder, has been on Exec teams 3 times and is also an Angel Investor.
Looking back, in the summer of 2019, Dimitar was in a different headspace.
At the time, he had two young kids at the time and a company under two years old.
Dimitar was juggling a lot of responsibilities.
This led him to feel as if he wasn’t doing 100% in either place: at home or at work.
Later on, the challenges and responsibilities of being a founder, a husband and a father caught up with him, as he tried to overcompensate and ended up feeling burned out.
In this episode, Dimitar and I are going through the struggle of measuring success when your identity is inextricably tied to your company. This was a struggle Dimitar faced head-on and had to navigate the fog of failure and make the tough call between perseverance and letting go.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Lastly, we explored the significance of benchmarking and assessing growth, and how founders can navigate their choices when faced with formidable decisions.
Dimitar's journey taught him the paramount importance of self-care and understanding individual priorities, which can be instrumental in making informed decisions for one's business.
Tune in and listen to Dimitar as he shares his entrepreneurial journey and invaluable advice, serving as a compass not only for those currently grappling with similar challenges but also for aspiring entrepreneurs.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Dimitar is the VP and General Manager of CrossBeam, the world's first and most powerful partner ecosystem platform. Dimitar is also a two-time Founder, has been on Exec teams 3 times and is also an Angel Investor.
Looking back, in the summer of 2019, Dimitar was in a different headspace.
At the time, he had two young kids at the time and a company under two years old.
Dimitar was juggling a lot of responsibilities.
This led him to feel as if he wasn’t doing 100% in either place: at home or at work.
Later on, the challenges and responsibilities of being a founder, a husband and a father caught up with him, as he tried to overcompensate and ended up feeling burned out.
In this episode, Dimitar and I are going through the struggle of measuring success when your identity is inextricably tied to your company. This was a struggle Dimitar faced head-on and had to navigate the fog of failure and make the tough call between perseverance and letting go.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Lastly, we explored the significance of benchmarking and assessing growth, and how founders can navigate their choices when faced with formidable decisions.
Dimitar's journey taught him the paramount importance of self-care and understanding individual priorities, which can be instrumental in making informed decisions for one's business.
Tune in and listen to Dimitar as he shares his entrepreneurial journey and invaluable advice, serving as a compass not only for those currently grappling with similar challenges but also for aspiring entrepreneurs.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
So I'm delighted to welcome Dimitar to the show today. He's a two times founder as well as being three times on exec teams of business over a billion valuation so I think he knows who he's talking about. Welcome, dimitar.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, james Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Well, which moment in this extended career of variety are we going back to?
Speaker 2:I think when we first connected, we spoke about my last company, heresy, which unfortunately ended up crashing and burning, as many startups do, or we decided to essentially pull the plug on it, but that's a very different experience compared to my first startup, which ended up being acquired. So a good outcome altogether, but it's the latter that we chose to focus on, because I feel it's something that it's a story not commonly shared.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to this moment then. So talk about which moment in this, what moment time we joined back into in this story.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess if we're looking for a timestamp, we're looking at roughly the summer of 2019, when we were basically getting to start fundraising again. We had raised before a seed round of just shy of a million USD pre-product I guess, pre-seed nowadays pre-product launch the product got some decent traction and we were basically ready to raise our seed or series A, depending again on whether this is pre-seed or seed but the decision was made that we actually were not going to persevere and do that, and so from there we went on the journey of exploring the acquisition, which ended up falling through in late November December the same year at which point we officially announced that we're shutting down the company. We kept it live until April 1st. We off-boards our existing customers and then we closed it down.
Speaker 1:Wow. What's interesting about this moment is that it sounds like you've raised, you've got some traction. So to many people listening, all this sounds like your success from your first one, sounds like it's on route to success in your second. But that's not the case.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, success in these things is fairly relative, right? So, for one, my personal circumstances at the time had drastically changed from the moment we had launched the business to where we were in that summer of 2019. I had previously worked at a company called Stack Overflow. The initial idea of what we ended up building in Heresy was conceive the Stack Overflow and implemented and had massively helped us grow the entire go-to-marketing there, so the idea was someone validated. So when I left, I felt like I had done a lot of the legwork and the validation and that's why it was fairly easy to raise our precede around Again. However, my personal circumstances drastically changed to the same that I started the company and got married with no family, no kids, and then, by the time the summer of 2019 had arrived, I had two kids under two, and that is a whole different ball game. I think for anyone listening who has been in that situation, having a company under two years old and two kids under two years old is a minefield.
Speaker 1:Wow. So how does that practically impact me? That sounds like a lot more when my son was two on Thursday. So I'm very much with you on the joys but challenges of parenthood. How does that practically make a different sense, your thinking?
Speaker 2:Well, the one thing that I have spoken about this with friends often, and it's one of these things that you often hesitate to share, but personally the way I felt was that I kind of felt like I was not being my best self, neither at home nor at work, if that makes sense. So my first daughter is born. I'm just about there, for two weeks, the statutory paternity here, and I'm back to the office. But you're days in the confused, you don't know what's happening. You kind of feel like you have left your partner alone at home to deal with everything that comes with a newborn, and so while I'm at work, my mind is at home, and then, while I'm at home, my mind is at work, thinking that another founder somewhere on the other side of the pond is out working you because they basically have they're able to put in 80 hour weeks as per usual and that's just not physically possible, and so that, I think, got the better of me.
Speaker 2:And again, like times this by two, probably even more, because it gets exponentially worse, I would say, when the second one arise and you kind of start getting the picture and I think you know I made the big mistake here. I don't know whether this is useful going into you, but I basically tried to overcompensate by working even more and neglecting myself and I just ended up burning out massively. Earlier, that's around June, I had a pretty substantial burnout, not just mentally mental health is like in tatters but physically I'm probably just refused to work around June. So I was forced to take a week off as well, and at that point you know, something is not. It's just not right.
Speaker 1:So to try and get this time, you try to give the time for business, you try to give the time to your family, and the only place you could find that time was yourself.
Speaker 2:Correct and that didn't. Didn't really work out well at all.
Speaker 1:How long did the bill take to come due for that? Because I'm like that. June, that's your second child. You say it becomes harder. You've been going for almost two years by this stage. How long do you think you've really been sort of taking that time away from yourself?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I don't know, because if I knew and if I could felt it properly, I think it would have probably acted upon it. I think it's just it accumulates, accumulates, accumulates, and at some point your body just refuses to work. So yeah, I don't know, and I wish it did again. For me it was literally a shutdown at some point.
Speaker 1:Just being very, very old, you know, all of a sudden, and so did that then lead to the conversations, or were they coincidental the timing of the burnout and the what's our future path?
Speaker 2:Conversations with you, with, with, so founder, with my investors, with my wife, all of the above yeah yeah, well, look, I guess I guess the conversations you constantly have, with these conversations right, it's a very fine kind of line that you're walking when you're trying to keep your current investors and future investors excited about what you're building.
Speaker 2:You know it's a finite, even when you're kind of having these conversations within your own heads where you can see the successes, you can see all the work that you have put in and the team has put in and the reward there. But you can also you're constantly second guessing yourself and doubting yourself. And one thing that you and I discussed when we first connected was you know I had the benefit but also, to a way, you know the disadvantage, or curse, if you will, of having been an executive in in a company that had gone zero to one, you know as those proverbial rocket ships. So you know I could taste it what hyperscale feels like at Stack Overflow and when you're not kind of experiencing this strong market pull and you're not really waking up every night thinking your hairs on fire from demand. Putting you that way, everything kind of seems a bit meaningless and you think, why am I doing this right?
Speaker 1:and that was not the case with with Harris.
Speaker 2:You know we're fighting too for now to to win customers, and that's kind of how we should be. But also, you know, in the back of my mind I'm always thinking, ah, is this time well invested? Right? And I was very lucky to have Joel Spolsky, who is the founder of Stack Overflow, as a personal mentor, and this is something that he kept on telling me from day one. You know that all the over overnight successes kind of feel like a success. But in the case of Stack Overflow, joel had told me that you know they could basically try him and Michael Pryor who was his co-founder.
Speaker 2:A bunch of other businesses. Many of them failed, but they just close them down, move on to the next one. Some of them failed again, move on to the next one until they had the you know the proverbial overnight success since Stack Overflow and Joel and Glitch and so forth. But for every one company that fails or at least in their case, they were probably so if they had made it there were a bunch of others that failed that no one ever heard of. So that's again another dynamic. The place at the back of your head. Am I spending time here? Should I be, you know, building something else, and this could be in the form of a pivot, this could be in the form of joining another scale up where you tool set and your passions could be better leveraged. Or, you know, should I be spending this time with my family and my it's you know that time that I'm never going to get back and again.
Speaker 2:So it's just you know all this noise in your head and, unfortunately, as a founder, you have very few people that can relate to this and you can.
Speaker 1:Then you can discuss and talk to you, but because those conversations all come with the genders.
Speaker 2:To an extent, I suppose. But again, you know, obviously we're kind of, we're in the, you know, living our own little bubble here, as you know founders and you know startup operators. But the reality is most people have no idea what this life is like, right, and so I'm lucky to have, you know, quite a few friends in, you know, working in startups, but also a lot of my friends are just, you know, they have very different jobs and it's very difficult to go and talk to them and for them to be able to relate right.
Speaker 1:Especially for the moment that you've raised money, or the moment for the moment you're starting a business, you're already people are, you're a success or you've you get no sympathy almost from the moment you start your business, kind of you've already achieved some people's dream. You then add on to that you've raised money, you're like, wow, you've really made it you're kind of people listening to you with the world's smallest violin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you're definitely onto something here. You know, one of the extra pressures was, you know, when we announced that we were launching Heresy. You know you had so many people emailing saying, oh congrats, you're absolutely going to smash it. And this was before we could even announce what we're building. You know what the product is going to be. Before we've had a product and that puts so much more pressure and, again, you know, your entire identity becomes your, your, your company. So you do want to be right, you do want to make it the success that you think it was going to be, which was the reason why you left in 95 in the first place, which is, you know, perhaps the biggest reason why it's so difficult to at some point decide that you know.
Speaker 2:Well, you know we were wrong, or at least you know we were right at the time. But with everything that we've learned over the last few years, this is not worth pursuing. But instead, you know, you have the good old escalation of commitments coming to the equation and instead you basically dig yourself deeper every single year. So look, you know I've kind of made the sound all very gloomy, it's not, it's. You know this has been. You know, building heresy have been the the best, in a weird way the best years of my professional career, if you will. We've learned the most, developed the most. But that particular decision of putting the plug on the company, it's, it's just so.
Speaker 1:So hard, but what's so so interesting is it feels like it's almost even harder for you than other people, because you've tasted that. Let's say you were a first time founder and it sounds like what you had achieved up to that point was objectively success, like you had fundraised, you had clients, you you were building. Yeah, it was just that you had exposure to a smaller portion of a much smaller portion of that and there was those kind of hyper growth businesses. Your people, who you were surrounding you, who you trusted, had run those types of businesses and therefore the metric that you were comparing them to your success to was yeah.
Speaker 1:Very different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's definitely the case. And again, I mentioned Joe earlier. You know he was the first one, I think, six months in, after we we spoke and I was sharing some numbers and what we're doing and being excited. I remember him kind of shaking his head and being like, yeah, I'm not sure about this one. And you know, I remember he him telling me that many of his friends essentially made this mistake of confusing grit and perseverance with, well, basically being gritty and persevering when they shouldn't, when things are just not worth pursuing.
Speaker 2:Because even when you have this phenomenal market pool and the market is pulling you where you want to go, despite Execution mistakes, or you know strong competition, whatever it might be, that's kind of when you should be, you know, clenching your teeth and pushing through, but not when things are Not harder, and this is very.
Speaker 2:This is I. I realized this is probably not the the conventional advice that you get, so it's kind of a fine line, you know, saying this is worth pursuing, this is not worth pursuing. But in our case we had it. You know, even even though we could again, you know, build a pretty impressive list of Companies who we use in heresy era was, you know, decent. We had so many, so many issues that we were battling with that I could just not see addressing in in the near future to get to to this kind of exponential growth.
Speaker 2:And so that was what the decision was based on it sounds like at some point you did.
Speaker 1:the grit is needed.
Speaker 2:It's just I using that grit like push through a wall, or are using it to cope with running, running sort of downhill really fast, exactly, yeah, yeah there's a Maybe many of you listeners will be familiar with with this book, but there's a book that I highly recommend on this topic, or quit, by Annie Duke, and she explores all the the pitfalls. The founders, but the regular people people but this is very applicable to founders Kind of fall into when they're making that, that call, and she's got many examples in the book of founders who have actually made the right call, quit the business with it, only to go and do something way more meaningful and bigger than Than what they originally had started building in, in certain cases quitting multiple times to get to the outcome. But if they never did in, persevere it. She makes a very compelling point that they would have never gotten there.
Speaker 1:Because I mean, that is, as a founder, you have a certain amount of time to use in your lifetime.
Speaker 2:Precisely, yeah, I've written about this in the past in in the context of sales, but this is very similar. You know, the analogy that I had made was that of poker very relevancy that we're talking about in Duke, but Time in this case, I equate to the chips that you have and the number of beds that you can make, and if you decide to play every single hand that you're dealt and some of them are going to be really bad that's the surest way to essentially get yourself out of the table, right. So you've just nailed my poker strategy.
Speaker 1:I don't, I never have the patience, when I'm playing poker, not to play every hand, and I think that's the key to it.
Speaker 2:It's basically knowing that was the same. No one to hold them, no one to fold them right. I think the key is knowing when to fold them.
Speaker 2:And again, going back to the conversation around heresy, and I think it became fairly obvious to us that this was one that we needed to fold, and from there on, you just have to basically Come to peace with without decision, because, again, your entire identity is wrapped up around the company. The idea, and it's, it's literally feels like you know, severing a limb. You know when, when you're kind of doing that.
Speaker 1:So how did you actually? Because you went into these decisions already feeling burnt out sort of physically and mentally these are quite hard decisions to make. How was that for you?
Speaker 2:Well, again, you know, the, the physical burnout, I think, was the the last thing, and that happened again for me. It really happened in in tune of 2019. At the time I was supposed to go and present the sasthene Paris and I literally I got sick probably a week before the event and I could feel that, you know, I was getting worse every single day, but it wasn't up until the night before that. I was still in my head thinking I was gonna make the train, but at that point I could just literally not open my eyes. I had like some crazy viral conjunctive virus on top of tonsillitis and also my body was literally just shutting down. And so that's kind of the final straw, that's kind of where you know your body is not even letting you. You continue.
Speaker 2:Right before that, you know, I think again, if you, if this is not the first time For you as a founder, as an operator, and you have a pretty robust framework of evaluating how the project is evolving, I think you know you can, you can see the writing on the wall quite, quite early. And again I mentioned I Was fortunate enough to have been in one of those rocket ships where the benchmark, at least for me was quite hard, hi. I was thinking, well, this is, you know, you can just not stop comparing, right, cannot stop yourself from comparing. I was thinking, oh god, like you know, and and for stuck over for a particular I had taken, I was very lucky to be very early on. I was employee number 26 and first on the ground in Europe, so it's almost like building a star, but within the startup. So you kind of always benchmarking is, you think, you know, within six months we had X amount of revenue, an X amount of bank customers. Within a year we had that many.
Speaker 2:And despite shortcomings of the product I'm sure there were some other time despite the usual hiccups that you get, it just kept on climbing and climbing and climbing, and the reality, with heresy, whether that was not the case, it would be one step forward, two back. One step forward, two back. And I think this is what, again, going back to our what we're saying about earlier, this was what Joe was poking around. You know, if you're not two step forwards, or three steps, almost one back, if it's the other, the ratio is the other way around, that's, you know, that's, that's the wrong one, you know it feels a little bit like comparing yourself to an Olympic athlete.
Speaker 2:Tell me more. I I'm not very familiar with it in the guttley.
Speaker 1:So Well, no, it might. We just feels like let's say, let's say you start running and you and you and you sort of do some times, and it's kind of like You've got an Olympic athlete who's absolutely smashed it and they're just, it's just. They are a very small subset of the population, mm-hmm, and it feels like compare it at one extreme, comparing yourself to an Olympic athlete, is a very demotivational benchmark to set.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but I think if you know that's actually, that's that's I like this. What I would say to this is that I think if you're going in to building a company, you should be having Olympic athlete expectations of yourself, and if you're not, I think you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and if you know that you're not hitting those numbers, that's why I say you know, I Don't.
Speaker 2:Wish we had tried getting there. Or you have to make the hard decision to essentially move on and start something else where you will be hitting those numbers and then no guarantees that you will. But again, at least you're giving yourself a chance, right? At least you're staying in the race.
Speaker 1:So if we really stretch this metaphor, it's something that if there are how many, let's say I don't know. Let's say that there are 500 sports in the Olympics. I don't think that many, but it's almost like going find the sport where you can sport slash market, where you can be close to an Olympic athlete.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, that's a good way of looking at it.
Speaker 1:How then? So just one thing we've talked about is just this having family during this time, with sort of looking at retrospectively, is there a way, do you think, to be the version of you that you want to be as a founder and have young children?
Speaker 2:I would say yes, I would say it's very, very tough and I think you know what, what I mentioned earlier, I, I definitely think I didn't play the right way. Again, my expectation is to put in the same amount of hours that I could done before having my kids, and you know that's just unrealistic. And again I did it and I paid the price, you know. So you can't do it that way, but at least you didn't pan out for me. I know there's some people who might be able to. I'm not one of them. I learned it the hard way.
Speaker 2:What I have come to appreciate since is that you should probably adjust and make sure that again you allow time for yourself. So maybe you're not putting in 10 hours a day, maybe it's eight, maybe six, but you do take time to. You know, go for a run, you know, go to the gym, whatever it might be, whatever kind of frees you mentally and just restarts, restarts you, and then those six instead of eight hours, or eight instead of 10 hours that you put in, they're going to be way more productive. So I didn't do that, you know. I raised my hand to say I didn't do that and the time I thought I was doing the right thing, again, the the outcomes would argue differently, you know so.
Speaker 2:I think?
Speaker 1:I think it's quite a traditional founder response. Isn't it self-sacrifice? It's like I can make this work at the cost of myself. That's right, like I wasn't even thinking about the cost of myself.
Speaker 2:I just thought I was doing the right thing, you know, the, the, the cost sort of analysis I did later and I realized, oh, I totally screwed my healthier and in that case no one wins, you know.
Speaker 2:So what happened to me when I had this burned out is I had to take I think it took a week off, which seemed like unheard of, because, again, even for the birth of my kids, I took two weeks off, right, which is very stupid, by the way. But you know different story. And so you look at it and then you're thinking, well, I'm taking the time off anyway because I can just no longer continue. And so the bottom line is you know that that was not a good decision on my part. At some point I should have probably spread. You know, I was here and there just to look after myself better, and you know we could have had a radically different outcome. But again, I don't think that would have changed the outcome of the company anyway, because again, there were so many different things around market, around technology, around products that essentially led to to where we were.
Speaker 1:But that's probably a whole different conversation. If you could tell a time, what do you think is a good amount of time to take off with having a child?
Speaker 2:I don't know. You know to me again, I think you know the one thing that I've come to appreciate is that you know you don't know what you don't know. Like I was a manager like you know I'm talking managing like a team of last people across multiple years of Stack Overflow, and I would like to think that I was a good manager as well, a good executive. But you know you don't help, like parental issues and because you're just not exposed. You have all the empathy in the world. But you know I've come to appreciate that this is one of the things that you have to live through to kind of appreciate. So you know your question. I don't know, it's different for everybody and I think again, different people have different priorities. Again, the the timing of it for me was was very tricky. Two under two is a handful regardless, you know, let alone when you're trying to build. You know, technically for me was like three under two, right with periscope number two, or that stage as well. But it's just. It was, yeah, a multitude of things.
Speaker 1:You know, it's not just the one, the one thing it sounds like part of this is acceptance that it is different. It's like not trying to play the same game. When it's sort of like with the business, it's acknowledging the market has changed when you're trying to find product market fit. Yeah, it sounds like as I found the trying to acknowledge your, your life has changed up yeah and therefore making a shift as well yeah, spot on.
Speaker 2:I think you know one of the best things I've heard about product market fit. That is not a destination, but it's a journey. And even when you have found product market fit, you know what took you from A to B. It's not necessarily was going to take the company from B to C and therefore you should be constantly seeking product market fit. In a way and the same is true to your point up you know the person who you were when you started the business. You're definitely not the same person you know when you're in the business, exiting the business, whatever it might be. So, yeah, you should definitely think about that.
Speaker 1:How would you so? I think as founders we're quite used to like the tools and techniques we do to explore product market fit. How do we explore I don't know, it's quite a phrase found a life fit or?
Speaker 2:Man found a life, fit Tools to explore it. I don't know. I think you know some of the things that we mentioned earlier, definitely things that would help kind of appreciating that you should be flexible in realizing again that the person You're never the same person in circumstances and never the same, and therefore you should not be having the same expectations at any single time if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:But other than that, I don't know what else to tell you here, and I find as well, james, so many of these things are very, very personal and depend on your individual circumstances. You know what your priorities are, what you're willing to sacrifice. Again, one of the things I know you and I align on is I personally am not willing to sacrifice family over my business. You know you can, and that doesn't mean that you cannot do both right, but if one starts getting the better of the other, I know which one I'm choosing.
Speaker 1:You're right, I'm certain landless. It sounds like the key here is surfacing these. Firstly, just considering surfacing your priorities like what rules are you on? Is it family first? Is it business first, Like that's being quite explicit about it. And then just acknowledging, taking a sense of that, how has my life changed? And maybe that is where coaching comes in, just that sense of like that time to just reflect and go. What am I trying to achieve, Like, how's my business doing? How am I doing as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's a great point that you make. Like, I don't know if many founders stopped to ask themselves how they're doing. And again, it's just so difficult and you have to put on the brave face and you have to protect your employees and your staff and everyone else from all the you know, all the shit that is going in your head and might be. Yeah, it's just, you know it's a very lonely job, right? So having someone to share with and someone to take stock of your situation and ask you that question how are you doing? It's very helpful, and especially if it's someone, I find that as well if it's another founder, it really helps.
Speaker 2:One thing I've mentioned to you I do angel investing on the side and recently one of my the companies that I had invested the founders were going through a similar thing nothing to do with family, but just trying to find product market fit, and they're super, super smart and capable founders with amazing track record. Before, for whatever reason, they just couldn't get quite there and my advice was that you know you should, you should move on and do something else which is kind of intuitive to what you know you might expect to hear, and that is the reality, I thought that you have from from the round that you know we worked on, and put it to work elsewhere. You know, do something else and I'll, you know I'll, back you again. I'm leaving you. But this is not the business. It's just not working and you know that's no reflection of of you, of your capabilities, of the way you thought about. The problem is just, you know, turned out not to be what we could hope for, and that's fine. That's the nature of the game.
Speaker 1:You know you win some you lose some Hmm, Because I'm going to this chips in it analysis. You've got a certain amount of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've got a certain amount of money in the business. You've also got a certain amount of money personally to support yourself during these journeys.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you are playing with limited resources.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, let's assume this particular company and I think you know many others, you know, let's assume they were really well capitalized. So you know they were, you know they can raise a bunch of money. But the question is, what else could you be doing with your time? You know, again, if we're shooting for that Olympic like outcome and you're clearly performing below the benchmark, you know, let's let's move on to something where you are closer and you can basically do those times, because this isn't clearly it's not you, it's, you know, the market you in is the business, whatever you might be.
Speaker 1:So but it's what's going to be about that, just to bring it all together, is it sounds like again, that's one of these things to surface in terms of what are my priorities, like someone else might say well, my priorities business, not personal. But they also might say my priority is a business, not a Senate Olympic one, that their benchmark might be different.
Speaker 2:I see, yeah, I am strictly looking at this from the lens of venture backed businesses, that's all I know. I've been in the SAS game for more than 15 years now, founded two SAS businesses, being on the exact team of three others, and so my benchmark is this, and that's why I speak of Olympic times, and that's why I mentioned earlier, when you made the analogy, that if this is not the mindset, don't do it. If you're looking for a lifestyle business, that's a whole different ball game. But for me, when, when we did heresy, we raised money with the expectation that we're building a billion dollar business, and every day I went into work and woke up thinking that that's the goal and I kind of start thinking this is not going to be the billion dollar business and you start seeing the sort of leading indicators do it. That's kind of where you should start thinking of walking away. And again, the family side of things is one thing that really helped me make that decision.
Speaker 2:You know, but again, what I kept on saying throughout the conversation here is that there were other things. You know, things were just not working and at some point you're thinking is this worth pursuing? Giving that? You know I'm not happy with personal life and this is the way I wanted to. And again, normally I think people will hang around for a lot, a lot longer than they should. To go back to you, I mentioned I need to you earlier. She's got a very, very good way of thinking about it. She says quitting on time always feels like quitting too early.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so I think, you know, we found this, and when it's your startup, it's very difficult to make that decision. I think what made it a little bit easier for me was the fact that, a you know, I kind of felt like I was neglecting my family, and, b I kind of hid the physical limitations where I was like, okay, this is not good for me, so this is not going to pan out well if I persevere. But the thinking and the doubts were there and the leading indicators this is not going to be a billion dollar business were there, right, and so let's. And again, you know, going back to the other analogy around time and chips, you know I left the company, took some time off afterwards to just to, you know, get my head straight, and then, a, joined a scale up to lead Europe, and that, you know, and that was like this again. So, again, it's not reflection of you know who you are, and that was a great experience.
Speaker 2:And now, with another company doing exactly the same thing, and things are doing the same, you know, going up into the right again. And so, again, imagine if I had decided, oh, we're going to stay with heresy, we would have closed around that we had on the table, that would have been easily another four years of, you know, grinding it out. Maybe something would have changed. But again, from all the data that we had at the time, the, the outlook was not positive.
Speaker 1:So I think the very thing pretty much is this is like be clear with yourself what your, what your success needs to look like, be clear on what your priorities are, and then constantly checking against me. Brave enough to to to pull the plug early, yeah, which is which is reality, is on time, Like when it's, if it's, if it feels early, it's probably on time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend checking out that book. By the way, very good book Going to by Arnie Duke.
Speaker 1:So, having made a wrap up in terms of Having talked about it through, I'm talking through it again today. What's the one thing that struck you most?
Speaker 2:It's just, you know, the one thing that we just mentioned when you were, when you were summarizing, you think quitting is it never feels good, you know it never feels right.
Speaker 2:But, again, having a framework as to how you evaluate when is the right time to do it massively helps. It helps and even then I think most people would have thought that it was a good time to do it Massively help helps and even then, I think most people struggle me included. Like, again, I told you I had the benchmark from my Stack Overflow experience, you know, even from, like my first company. You know we were way less experienced but and you know, didn't really know what we're doing, but still we were doing. You know some things a lot better. You would see more, at least, we were growing a lot faster and that was to do, I think, with the market rather than anything else. But yeah, to your point, I think you know having a framework to evaluate this would massively help and knowing what you're doing it. For again, I think there are multiple threads kind of intertwined in this story.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing all that stuff and it's very helpful by the founders going through the same thing as well.
Speaker 2:So it's, good Awesome.
Speaker 1:Catch you soon, cool.
Speaker 2:Cheers James.