I’ve started getting Linkedin messages again, congratulating me on my work anniversary. I have a bunch of fake positions listed (I mean, being my brothers’ older brother is in fact real, just not really a position per se) so it’s sometimes hard to know what people are talking about; but no, this was about a real one. We started working on TrueML in mid-January of 2013.

There’s nothing wrong with stepping down as a founder. We start companies for various reasons, we fit different stages, and we have different definitions of success, not to mention tolerance levels for sheer pain and uncertainty on a daily basis. It’s ok to walk away, in fact it’s often the right choice. If, however, you’re like me: if starting companies, for you, is self expression borne out of necessity; if you chose an extremely difficult problem, knowingly, for the shot of making a real difference; and if you really, really, absolutely fucking hate losing… Well, in that case, you gotta stick it out for a very long time.

Like, a very long time. So long that almost all your VCs write you off. So long that corporate observers rotate two or three times and stop answering emails. So long that people ask “are these guys still around??” So long that every person you wanted to impress for the wrong reasons leaves your friends group. So long that your competitors go from “they’ll never make it” to “we are better than them” to “I can’t believe you’re choosing them after our years of working together!” So long that the solution you invented and the market you defined become the standard. Until everyone else quits. That’s how long.

At the end of all this, you need to have been right all along. You need to have had the better product all along. Then, if you survive, like Bubba Gump Shrimp Co, you will be the only ship to capture all them shrimp. Then, after you yourself won’t be so sure anymore, you’ll have won.

We’re not in the end, but we’re close to the end of the beginning. I can feel it in my bones. And I’m not going anywhere.

When the Nazis came, Bronislava and Herman’s lives would never be the same. They were, as we call it in well-laundered English today, “displaced”.

They didn’t know each other back then, or maybe they did, but they had their own separate lives that the Nazis ended. Bronislava, or grandma Bronia as we called her, was sent to a camp in Siberia. When they ran out of food they ate their horses, and then I don’t know what. Herman, grandpa Shmuel, joined the Red Army and remained an avowed communist to his death.

This isn’t their whole story, these two people smashed together by the aftermath of war, my dad’s parents. It’s the story of what their generation brought to us: the trauma of war, and specifically of hunger.

Oh we’ve had traumas since, trust me. A story for a different time. But food trauma was real and ever present. Old people hiding stale bread in the nooks and crannies of their homes, just in case the Nazis ever came back. “Yeled tov mash’ir tzalahat rey’ka”, a good boy leaves an empty plate. Wasting food, the cardinal sin.

It took me decades to stop leaving leftovers in the fridge until I ate them or they became moldy. It took me years to stop losing my mind over wasted food. And now, the boy forgot to eat his sandwich and it’s going in the trash, not in my mouth. What does he need our trauma for. I call that progress.

The most common refrain among older beginners practicing any hobby is “I wish I had started earlier”. I get it, but like any other time when people wish to be younger (read: I want to be who I am now in a younger body), it’s misguided.

Sure, I’m out of time, in a sense. I’m 43 years old. Statistically, I have fewer years to live than I’ve lived already, certainly in good health. My athletic performance is on a down slope, in a decade I will lose my explosive power, in two decades I will be frail, and then I’ll die. Which, you know, not great if you’re trying to get stuff done.

Still, we’re missing something here, and that’s the alternative value of time. The reason one hasn’t started this or that hobby earlier is because they had better, or more cost effective, things to do with their time. In your 20s and 30s you wonder who you’ll marry, whether you’ll have kids, make money, and what your career may look like. In your 40s, that’s not the case. I’m married to the love of my life, my kids are doing well, my professional situation is good. I, basically and positively, have nothing better to do with my time. What better time to pick up a hobby?

Scorpion (stylized as </SCORPION> because hAckERs or whatever) was a bad TV series, a knockoff of Lie to Me which was a knockoff of House MD which… You get it. Really. I wanted to like it so much and I couldn’t make it past the first season. I have no explanation how they made it to four. It left, I think, zero impact on pop culture, but it did leave us with one good scene – S1E1’s diner chess scene.

In it, the protagonist (who’s obviously some kind of genius, naturally) explains to his future hire, a normie mom, that her autistic son isn’t mentally challenged – his fudging with salt shakers and sugar packets is actually him playing chess against himself, and when challenged, he was able to beat a grandmaster in just a few moves. I can’t find it online so take my word for it or rent it and see for yourself.

It’s weird but I sometimes find myself in a similar, though much less dramatic, position. Since I’m in my 40s, more friends are starting to have teenagers – with all their angst, hormones, troubles, you name it. Now I’m no child psychologist and definitely not some genius on a TV show (though if you’re hiring, who knows? Have your people talk to my people) but I do sometimes recognize intelligence and passion in others, and I know from personal experience that non-conformism can indicate boredom and intelligence, not something to beat out of a child just because their parents can’t relate. They’re just not made to sit up and raise their hand and answer questions in Ms. Levy’s third grade math class.

I can’t use chess to make my point so I often use this story by Isaac Asimov called Profession. You should absolutely go read it, but the gist of it is that learning new capabilities to become productive cogs in the machine can, and maybe will, be sped up and automated, but the creative process that generates that knowledge cannot be. However, since people who will benefit from being productive, professionally-trained members of society far outnumber rebellious, creative folks, they will spend their early years in a constant struggle, not finding their place. This story helped me as a teenager, though I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, and it may help you or your favorite normie parent who has to deal with a future founder in the making. Frankly, I don’t envy my parents and my teachers and what I put them through.

I often describe the evolution of a company as an upwards spiral: you keep progressing and you’re also on a continuous cycle of having to re-evaluate parts of the company for the next level. One of those evaluations is of executives and their ability to continue to lead the functions they are in charge of. Here’s a rough framework I’ve found helpful.

First, by “executives” I mean third line managers, that is people who manage people who manage people who manage individual contributors. Naturally this implies a stage and scale of company (things are much more hectic and fast paced at an earlier stage) and also functions (a VP-level IC hire doesn’t fit in this model).

Executives’ cycle is generally 2 years long and is divided into four 6-month phases (roughly similar to the forming-storming-norming-performing model of team building, another one of my favorites). The absolute length of the phases conforms to the speed of growth of the company but only by a bit – I’ve noticed the same at FraudSciences, Klarna, PayPal, and TrueAccord at different stages and velocities.

Stage 1: acclimation. The executive is settling in, learning the ropes, understanding where the bodies are buried. At this stage you’re either sighing a big sigh of relief because you’ve hired someone to take a huge chunk of work away or (hopefully rarely) get the sinking feeling that you hired the wrong person. This is the time to correct that mistake. Quick learning executives or ones putting out dumpster fires will have some positive effect even at this stage.

Stage 2: transformation. The executive learned the ropes and is starting to make changes. They may hire new people to replace non-scaling team members, cycle through talent, re-negotiate operating mechanisms with you, and so on. This is when you start seeing their playbook in action, and the seeds of future performance are planted. This is also when this exec will be torched on Glassdoor or in exit interviews for “not getting it”. This is not necessarily a bad signal.

Stage 3: performance. Under-performers are out, new team is in, playbook installed: this is when you’re getting the most out of your exec.

Stage 4: scale. Having promoted or hired their staff, the executive can now extract themselves from daily operations as much as possible, negotiate operating mechanisms with their directs, and be ready to move to the next level of abstraction: take on more responsibilities or deal with, for lack of a better term, “strategy”, as contrast to daily tactics. That means planning ahead, designing their organization, developing new capabilities, and improving cross-functional work.

Interestingly, not delivering in stage 4 is a very common yet often disregarded failure mode for executives, and it’s allowed to fester until they buckle under the weight of daily responsibilities and burnout. I spend a considerable amount of time pushing my directs to enhance their bench, if only because of my own experience of not having done that.

True story: in my 20s I thought teaching martial arts was going to be my career. I was always someone who needed to work hard to cover for lack of natural athletic talent, but by then I had been training for a few years and running most classes for my teacher. I had a small team that I was running out of a basement in Tel Aviv that I was subleasing from another teacher; it was barely breaking even and I was mostly funding it from my three other positions as a youth instructor and then from my work as a data analyst.

Then reality, and startups, and life interfered. Making ends meet was complicated enough without a black hole in my budget, and my move to San Jose sealed that part of my journey. I tried getting back to it occasionally and nothing ever clicked, I got injured once or twice, and having lived half of the last 9 years on planes didn’t help either. So, between all of the above I spent more than a decade away from the mats, wondering whether I was ever going to come back.

This year I found this school, and things clicked. And here I am, in my 40s, my whole body aching for oxygen that my lungs can’t provide while I struggle to hold my own against bigger, better opponents who are five, ten, and twenty years my junior. I still need to work twice as hard to compensate for my lack of talent. I may never get very far, but I don’t worry about that. I have time, and (a tiny bit) less ego, and mostly I have perspective: it turns out that I feel at my best when I’m fighting for my life, figuratively or literally. It’s also why, despite nursing my fourth mild injury in six months, I will be back to the mats as soon as humanly possible. As it turns out, we’re all going to die, but some things matter. This matters to me.

I’ve recently started helping a small team working on an early stage product. Before I got involved I heard troubling news: they had no product-market fit, a large deal had fallen through that was undermining core dynamics, and maybe it’s best to just build [insert latest fintech fad] instead. Once I got involved I discovered that the product had thousands of happy-path iterations, hundreds of thousands of proof points, and more traction than it could currently handle.

I did nothing but change the framing from how early products are perceived to find traction to how they actually find traction. Three observations here.

Only the visionary and the desperate: the more innovative or disruptive* your product is, the more it’s likely to find traction with early adopters. They are those who see the next paradigm before others do. Most of the time they are the ones that can’t fit in the current paradigm either because they want the new future you’re promising – the visionary – or the current paradigm is killing them – the desperate. They are never the largeco boss. Startups chasing that One Big Deal to Rule Them All aren’t chasing real traction, they’re chasing a rescue fantasy. Start with the few who love you, make them extremely successful, and watch how they become your best sales people.

Hard on the vision, easy on the details: teams often get stuck on certain modalities or early product features that aren’t core to what the product is trying to do, and that holds them back. Monetization is one example – it’s important to be paid, but the right combination of feature gating in your freemium model isn’t something you’re likely to get right on first try. Knowing where you want to go and then being flexible on other details is critical, otherwise every failed experiment feels like the product is failing. It isn’t – not as long as you have engaged happy-path users.

Product Market Fit hindsight: the way people describe PMF you’d think it feels like the Warp Drive engaging in Star Trek. It’s never that. Reaching PMF feels like a million different things breaking, customers complaining, and stuff you used to do manually not working on a daily basis. It’s an upward spiral that starts with a few users that love you, and a behavior that you encourage and build on. It’s almost never evident in the moment, and it often feels like failing forward.

*Some products still honestly deserve this adjective

Ever wondered why CEOs aren’t more visible outside of their formal commitments? It’s because doing anything outside of the paths of corporate machinery like connecting authentically on social media, or developing a hobby that requires creativity, or any similar activity requires a level of energy that senior people don’t have. That’s because of what running a company is like. It can be fun, and stressful, and many other things, but most of all it’s an incredible sink of emotional energy. Moving between engagements with different people in very different emotional states, handling mostly emergencies and escalations, hearing (sometimes) bad news and having to work through the rest of your day.

Running a company is like having a monkey on your shoulder 24/7, screaming for attention. I’m using “monkey” and not a more colorful “vampire” because we enjoy the work most of the time, it’s just demanding. I’m using “monkey” and not a more sinister and dramatic “black demon” because it doesn’t have to be (and in my case, isn’t) connected with depression or anxiety (well, beyond a CEO’s usual baseline which, if you ask Ben Horowitz, can be quite a lot). If you think it’s a silly metaphor, share it with your favorite c-level exec and watch their 1000-mile stare and the slight nod of agreement.

There’s nothing to do with the monkey. It’s there, forever really, unless you give up the role (and as someone who’s quit senior roles before, the monkey does go away). The downside is unless you’re very deliberate about it, after a while, the screaming is all you hear. So you stop doing anything not work-related, and you schedule less engagements, and you retreat into well-plowed paths of business management and maybe some investing because you never know on which day the monkey will wake up in a bad mood, so why risk the exposure of standing on stage talking about something while you’d rather be anywhere else because all you can hear is the monkey.

I wake up every morning determined to deal with the monkey because I feel that otherwise, almost two decades into my tech journey, I risk being flattened by the weight of its presence into being a very boring person indeed. So I read a lot of fiction and write some things and work out and run a few silly little side projects. They don’t shut the monkey up but they dim the noise for a bit so I can recharge, think better of myself, and also be a better CEO along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be for you but at least you know now that thing that’s distracting you, it’s the monkey. It’s part of the job. It’s good to be mindful about dealing with it.

Here’s a video of my talk from Fintech Devcon: why experienced founders should try to solve Really Hard problems, and my playbook for doing so.

There’s a Tai Chi master in Israel, called Nir Malkhi. He heads Israel’s biggest school for “internal arts”, a family of Chinese Martial Arts that broadly fit in the Kung Fu category. He has been teaching for decades. His students come to learn discipline, focus, a practice. They also learn how to defend themselves in hand to hand combat using Tai Chi. Tai Chi, that practice with such slow and graceful moves that Chinese retirees famously practice it in parks every morning.

Tai Chi works well for self defence, says Master Malkhi. He also demonstrates. Master Malkhi is very ill but before he fell ill, he wasn’t someone you wanted to up against. He was powerful, centred, fast. His Tai Chi demonstrations were convincing. You could see it.

One thing people often forgot is that Nir Malkhi grew up as a fighter. He served in the IDF’s equivalent of SEAL team 6. He was a hardened, well trained killer. Tai Chi had absolutely zero impact on his ability to fight. In fact, he would probably beat the average guy up using ballet or Lord of the Dance moves just the same. That’s not what he told his students, though. You can fight with Tai Chi, he said. That wasn’t the truth. He was at the end of a complex journey, enjoying the fruits of his labor, confusing where he was with the road he had taken. His students, devoid of his training and background, couldn’t use Tai Chi to save their lives – literally.

The worst type of career advice is given without the context that brought you to where you are.

It’s beyond failing to recognize luck, even though thinking luck had nothing to do with your success is a major symptom for losing your relevance. Most people who’ve reached a certain level of success or material possessions fail to realize that their enlightened advice is diametrically opposed to their lived experience. Bill Gates recasting himself as a philanthropist (latest revelations notwithstanding), Steve Jobs telling people to “stay foolish” while running his company like an intelligence operation, Naval telling people to Not Chase Status. Maybe it’s a symptom of lack of thinking about thinking. It’s surprising, because it’s bad advice offered in good faith by smart people, but there it is.