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I Hated My Company So Much I Tried To Give It Away

I Hated My Company So Much I Tried To Give It Away

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This is the written version of this week's episode. As always, the podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version — this is the good bits, organised. Listen on [Spotify / Apple / YouTube].Hey,So this is a crazy one:Between roughly 2018 and 2022, at the exact moment AJ&Smart hit its peak revenue (around $6 million revenue, with a 47% profit margin), I wanted to give the company away.Not sell it. Give it. To anyone who’d take it. Or shut it down. I was talking to people about both options. My co-founder wanted to be bought out, and honestly, part of me wanted to be bought out too. There is a very real alternate timeline where I am not running this company today.If you’ve never owned a business, that sentence sounds insane. Peak revenue! Great margins! What’s the problem?If you have owned a business, you might already know exactly what the problem was. So let me give you the short version first, and then the whole story.The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)* The “held hostage in your own company” feeling is real, common, and almost nobody talks about it publicly. I now speak to founders constantly who describe the same thing: you walk into your own office and feel like you’re not wanted there. Like it’s not your company anymore. Like you’d have to ask permission to change anything.* It’s almost never a revenue problem. It’s a hiring problem. Not “hiring is bad.” Hiring badly, for years, in ways that compound.* Perks don’t buy goodwill. They buy expectations. We had a chef on Fridays, yoga twice a week, retreats, a basically unlimited tech budget. The result was not gratitude. It was “why don’t we have a chef every day?”* “Hire when you need someone” is a spending instruction. The second I removed myself from hiring and told the team to hire whenever they felt they needed to, people hired the moment they felt slightly busy. At our peak of dysfunction, we had four employees managing one small office. My friend Sam Ovens was running a $12M company with nine people and a cleaner who came once a week.* The way out was not “small team good, big team bad.” I want to be really clear on this, because it’s the lazy takeaway. Hiring is one of the only real forms of leverage a business owner has. The lesson is that there’s a right size and a right culture for you, and you probably can’t know it until you get it wrong.* If you feel this way right now: it’s fixable. But it takes years, not quarters. And almost everyone I know who took the eject seat and sold tells me the same thing today: I wish I hadn’t done it.Okay. The story. (You can also just watch the video if you don’t feel like reading)My own personal utopia (and how I wrecked it)I started AJ&Smart to build my own little utopia. A place where I could work on interesting things with people I actually wanted to be around. And for years, it was exactly that.Then it worked too well. There was so much demand for what we did that I decided to see how far we could push it, and we scaled aggressively: from a couple of people adding one or two hires a year to 36 people. My co-founder went on a six-month sabbatical and came back to a different company. I want to be honest about the responsibility here. The negative vibes that followed were mine. I built them.Here’s what daily life looked like at the “peak”:Every single day, someone knocked on my office door with an irritation. A political fight with another employee. A complaint about a perk. Someone would come in, maybe pissed off, maybe sad, or flustered, tell me something going on in their family, and ask for a raise. I was in my late twenties. I had no idea how to handle that, so I just... gave people ad hoc raises. Then they’d tell their colleagues, and the colleagues would come knock on the door.Friends hired friends. Sometimes that worked (it’s how we got Laura, who now runs Facilitator). Often it created factions. We occasionally hired someone who turned out to be, let’s say, creatively honest, or who’d just vanish for days.And the perks. My theory at the time was: maybe people are unhappy because there aren’t enough perks. So: chef, yoga, retreats, gear, very little spending oversight, because we were making so much money anyway. And every perk generated a new complaint about the perk. The yoga time doesn’t suit me. Why only Fridays for the chef?We hired coaches who told us we needed systems: weekly check-ins, quarterly career talks, one-on-ones. We did all of it. Then we ran the anonymous employee survey and the results were worse than the year before.I walked into my own office feeling like the least welcome person in the building. Around that time I had coffee with the CEO of a much bigger Berlin company and asked her how it felt when she walked into her office. She said: “I feel like nobody wants me there.” She got out. Derek Sivers, one of my favorite people on the planet, got out too, and was so ...
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