To begin with, I’m going to use the acronym GT in place of the business we all know I’m talking about just to prevent any possible chance of this article ranking and being representative of GT ‘cause I’m not trying to blow up what all of us have been working on, you know?
A year ago I found out I had an aortic aneurysm, and as a result of the diagnosis I had to stop doing any even semi-intense exercise. Exercise was always my stress/anxiety/depression medicine and was the main thing I used to keep my mood up. The last year has been too hard without it; I tried multiple replacements but nothing worked. And so this year I get the surgery so it’s all fixed up, and in six weeks I’ll be back to whatever exercise I want. I cannot tell you how excited I am to get back to the person I was.
One of the big paradoxes in startup is that the same personality traits that enable founder success often later become instrumental to founder failure
— Zak Kukoff (@zck) June 20, 2019
One of my favorite things about building GT is that I reached these points where in order for the business to progress I had to change a character defect or personal limitation about myself. It’s the main reason I recommend doing a startup; I have never met anything that forced so much personal development and refinement. Here at GT I’d watch people roll in and out, and sure enough, frequently the ones who left you could very clearly tell were butting up against an aspect of themselves. And so for a long time I considered my greatest talent my ability to keep up with the required changes, to chameleon into whatever the business needed me to be; but at some point my colors stopped changing.
I think there’s two things required for a change– willingness to change and the actual ability to. I’ll always have all the willingness in the world for GT, but there’s a real lack of energy inhibiting the ability. The founder role is a giving role and I very clearly can remember when I noticed I was giving from a place within me that didn’t exist, three years ago, bankrupted. I kept doing it. Well, the debt has caught up and the well is dry. Now it feels like I’m constantly burdened by this weight that I can’t really unburden myself with. I mean, year two or year three Micah would be running circles around me. Brian and I have tried numerous solutions to get me out of it but nothing has caught on. GT can’t wait. All that’s left is a big step back. Especially considering that I’m no longer hiding it well; I don’t want to impact others’ experiences here negatively.
I’m genuinely excited to see what the next CTO does here (although they better lead off by saying “wow this is the greatest tech i’ve ever seen” or maybe “what sort of preternatural genius architected this beautiful solution”), and I imagine the next CTO will be drastically different than me in ways the business very much needs right now. Scaling problems are totally different than starting-and-figuring-things-out problems and so I imagine a very different personality type will accompany the change. (Although do we really need one that believes in the Abrahamic God? Why take the risk?) I’ll be around to help with the transition, and Brian is working on a quieter, energy-replenishing role for me. All good things.