Why I decided to leave the best job of my entire career
It doesn’t matter where you come from,
It matters where you go
No-one gets remembered
For the things they didn’t do
-Frank Turner “Peggy Sang the Blues”
It’s rare over the course of a career to find a job where you have a great cultural fit, amazing co-workers, equitable compensation, and industry leading products in a growing market. Over the past year I’ve been fortunate to find all of those things and more while working for Canonical, the company behind the nearly ubiquitous Ubuntu Linux operating system.
Despite all of that, I recently decided to join my good friend Tom Cox in launching a startup. For many people this would seem like madness, but for me it was inevitable. Over the past year I have grown my team from 7 to 20 people, traveled the world and had the privilege of working with companies in the midst of a profound transformation as they adopt the cloud.
So, why on earth would I walk away now?
Over the past 15 years I’ve written countless business plans for ideas that never saw the light of day, I even launched my first (and in retrospect, somewhat disastrous) startup in 2009, and I always seemed to fall back into the safe, easy world of working for someone else. It wasn’t until Tom approached me about CANDL that I realized that I was ready to make the leap back into the startup world.
The thing that keeps me coming back to any job every day with my best efforts is building great things. Sometimes those things are teams, sometimes they are products, now that means building a great company.
Building a whole company is a daunting endeavor but one that utterly fascinates me. From the big picture of establishing a culture and vision to the minutiae of designing the systems and processes that run the business day to day.
Tom and I approached our company CANDL not with an idea for a product or a service, but with one founding belief. We believe that connectivity has become a fundamental human right. Being an active participant in a global society has come to rely on unfettered access to the key platforms on the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp. While these are luxuries and diversions for those of us in the first world, they are tools of survival for refugees, displaced peoples and dissidents.
The experience of refugees is so far removed from our own day to day activities that we set out to have personal conversations with people who had lived that reality. In the course of these conversations, Tom and I met Omar Alabbas, a 29 year old business development professional from Syria who, in 2015 walked, hitchhiked and stowed away on trains to move from Damascus to Dresden, Germany. As Omar described his perilous journey something amazing came to light for us. For Omi, and the other refugees he traveled with, being connected to the internet was oftentimes more important to them than food or shelter. Being connected was how they found safe passage and kept together over their more than 2000 mile journey.
With this insight, Tom and I began forming our ideas about what CANDL would be. We knew that we wanted to build something that helped refugees stay connected, but we also wanted to build a profitable business that would fund our charitable efforts.
We are just now taking our first, tentative steps as a company, raising funding, building partnerships, finding advisors and mentors, hiring staff and prototyping our products. I don’t know when I will draw a salary next, or if we will find a product/market fit, or if I can hire an engineering team to deliver on our vision, but I do know that building something great is what matters most to me, and that the place where I can do the most good, for the most people is here at CANDL.
