At the beginning of 2019, I founded and built an amazing startup. At the end of 2019, I left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next few days, I’m going to write about what I think happened in 2019 that meant that I went from the happiest I’ve ever been in a role to depressed, burnt out, and running away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are my viewpoints only, and I’m sure there’s more to the story than I know or that I can represent myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The email below is the one I sent my mentor explaining what I believe was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As I write the follow on posts, I’m going to try to document what I think the other inflection points were. In the end, I know that writing this will bring me catharsis and ending, and will hopefully act as a long letter to a future self about the choices I made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I let Odeko know right before Thanksgiving that I wanted to transition out. I’m going to join Sam in the new year at Reconnect, but keep 1-day per week for Q1 at Odeko to make the knowledge transfer less jarring. <\/em><\/p>
3 things happened at Odeko that made me confident in this direction:
(1) We had the Monday meeting you and I talked about, and I pre-pitched it to ########## and ##########, and across all three touchpoints the plan got reduced from a specific 3-prong approach that I was advocating for to having the whole business focus on a single prong with #### independently\u00a0running a group for the second \u00a0prong.
(2) As a result of that, my scope got reduced from January through now in a way where there isn’t a full-time job for me presently (but in a way where I can see that there would be a full-time job in June 2020). Essentially, at some point we will need all 3 prongs, #### will get bored running the 2nd prong, and it would be a natural fit for me to help drive us through #2 and #3. ############## is owning #1.
(3) It became clear that the tension between myself and the engineering leadership had transitioned into full friction, and that was slowing the business down. I advocated very strongly against a set of process changes, and the decision was made to proceed with those changes. It was a bitter way to come to a conclusion in a process that needed to be more collaborative.
I told Sam that we need to get to April, and know that we have a real business. So between now and then, I’m going to put my energies there, and hopefully there’s lots of good news moving forward from the Spring.<\/em><\/p>Email to Jean Sini about leaving Odeko<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the beginning of 2019, I founded and built an amazing startup. At the end of 2019, I left. Over the next few days, I’m going to write about what I think happened in 2019 that meant that I went from the happiest I’ve ever been in a role to depressed, burnt out, and running […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-building-odeko"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8fAIx-uI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1905,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions\/1905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/builder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}