You're Great, and You're Fired

I got fired.

It feels like failure. For 54 days, I worked 16-hour days and weekends. I gave up sleep. I put off messages from friends. I skipped dates with my wife.

Then the founder told me, more or less, "You're great, and you're fired."

What we built

I inherited a rough idea from the founder. In 54 days, I took it from 0 to 0.9. Together with the team, we built a product that was useful and pretty damn good.

The product's core promise was to help founders identify promising ideas and validate paying customer interest in 24 hours, before they spend months building the technical side of the product. By the end, it felt almost magical. Users with little technical knowledge could refine and launch a polished idea, complete with marketing, email campaigns, and Meta ads, in under 90 minutes.

Then the founder let me go, and he let the rest of the team go too.

The hard truth is that AI moves so fast that, at least in the founder's opinion, our product wasn't significantly more valuable than AI on its own. What it lacked was a domain expert in go-to-market engineering and someone who knew sales and marketing email campaigns cold.

That person wasn't me.

The first ten minutes

I had the skills to build something useful and pretty good. I put in the effort to make it happen. I got fired anyway.

Here's what went through my head in the first 10 minutes:

I'm a failure.
What's wrong with me?
Am I incompetent?
I already told friends and family I was working on a big project I was really excited about, and that they'd see it in a few months. How do I explain this?
I was stupid to take this risk.
I was stupid to sacrifice so much time, brainpower, and energy.

If you've ever started something and watched it end badly, you probably know this list.

Two paths

There are two ways to process news like this.

The first is the self-loathing spiral. It's more of the same: "I'm a failure." That path robs you of your agency.

The second path starts with one question: Did I give everything I had?

If the answer is yes, the conclusion is very different. I'm more empowered than I was before. I'm more connected, more knowledgeable, and more energized than I was before I took this on. I have more agency and more ability to achieve my dreams.

To explain why, I have to go back to where I was before I took the job.

Living the dream. Just not mine.

Before this, I was in a rut.

A few months earlier, we had turned down VC funding for the company my cofounder, our team, and I had spent 14 months building. We had raised just shy of $1 million. My day job felt repetitive and easy. I was afraid I was falling behind in the field I'm an expert in: AI, data engineering, and ML. I wasn't inspired to build.

So I took a sabbatical to figure out what I wanted.

I had a lot of time, and I enjoyed it. I spent it with my wife. I caught up on years of sleep debt. I read books I got lost in. I ate a lot of ramen with friends. I enjoyed Tokyo, a city I love. And I had a high-paying remote day job.

I was living the dream. Just not mine.

It took four days of sabbatical to know I wanted to build. I wanted to be part of the frontier. I wanted to do work that earned respect from the communities I admire. Most of all, I wanted to keep stretching myself and growing.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote about this in his notebooks:

Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrefies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.

Inaction is a sin against your potential. If you can stretch yourself, you should.

Back to building

After one week of sabbatical, I went back to work. I didn't have a business idea. I just went back to the things that inspire me: building things I like to use and learning new technology and tools.

I worked on a couple of projects. Some explored ontologies in large language model systems for better recall and fewer hallucinations. Others were just for fun, like an app that helps football fans get back into the gym with workouts based on their favorite footballers' matchday performance.

I did everything myself: the social media marketing automations, the SEO and copy, the website design, the data and backend systems, and the ML models. In 3 weeks, I learned how to do agentic, department-level system design across different agent priorities and departments, and how to automate a large part of social media without sacrificing quality.

The numbers backed me up. I grew the page to over 1 million views in 30 days, and the website averages about 15,000 weekly active users. It's all organic, and it now runs entirely on its own.

None of that was planned. It happened because I said, "I'm curious. I want to keep learning. I like this. This is fun."

The opportunity

Then a friend posted that he was looking for an AI dev to launch his next project with him. He's a successful founder who has exited companies for over $100 million, and this was his first business after taking several years off from entrepreneurship. He was really excited, and that got me excited.

When we looked at what the role needed, I looked like a great fit: take something from zero to one and build a useful system on an aggressive timeline, in a startup, under a great founder.

Within days of reaching out, we had a deal. I became the company's first engineer, the founding engineer, and we got to work.

Within a month, we had built something. It wasn't good, but it was something. And boy, was I excited.

I stayed up all night coding with my agents. The first thing I did every morning was check on my systems. Did something new ship? Did I make something great? On most days, the answer was no. I was excited every day anyway.

What I learned about sales

I was learning a ton, and not just technically. I learned how to manage teams, how to run executive meetings, how to find go-to-market, and how to build up the skills I lack: sales, marketing, copy, and the systems for launching a product.

Here's the thing. I've built a handful of startups. You haven't heard of any of them. That's not because the products weren't great. It's because I suck, or sucked, at marketing. I sucked at getting to product-market fit. For a long time, you had to choose between being a builder and being a salesperson. Sales didn't speak to me, so I didn't spend time on it.

Working under the founder changed that. He changed how I think about funnels, go-to-market, and building companies. Now the sales, the marketing, and the systems behind a launch get me just as excited as building the product itself. By the end, I had basically internalized the quiz funnel doctrine. The old me would not have believed that.

Dogfooding

Then came the grind. We put together our marketing campaigns, and the product started coming together. I spent 40 sleepless nights in full sprint mode, shipping 20 to 30 PRs a day. Every iteration made the product better.

Then we had our first dogfooding session. Before this job, I had never even heard of dogfooding. Now I'm convinced there is no other acceptable way to build a company.

Dogfooding means using your own product to build your product. It forces you to be so close to it that when anything is inconvenient, broken, or less than magical, you fix it. If you force yourself to use something tedious, you will very quickly want it to be seamless and valuable.

We dogfooded for 3 days at the founder's house. I learned how he works with a team under stress, how to be a good leader, and how to give exceptional constructive feedback without discouraging the team. I also had a lot of fun, and so did the rest of the team.

The session uncovered a ton of flaws. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is a perfect iPhone launch, I would have rated the product a 3. It kind of worked. It did the things if you knew exactly how to use it. It had bugs. It still needed a lot of handholding, human intervention, and expertise. It wasn't magical.

Take the break

So what did I do next? I left for China with my wife and got married.

That was a 10-day break, and I spent a lot of it thinking. If you're in a sprint, take a break. It restored all of my energy. I came back with new ideas and couldn't wait to get back to the product.

When we landed back in Tokyo after our wedding, I got right to work. The first thing I did when we walked in the door was queue up my agents, write plans, and get things running.

From 3 to 7.5

In 14 days, the product went from a 3 out of 10 to a 7.5. Those are harsh numbers, but what it could do felt like magic.

If you've ever used a magic product, you know the feeling. You ask it to do something, and it just does it. It's like watching an NBA player dunk. You don't understand how somebody can jump that high, that smoothly. They make it look effortless.

The product went from clunky and confusing to effortless and useful. It could take a founder with no background in a space, help them launch a pursuable idea, and validate it within 24 hours. It did almost everything we set out to do.

Almost. It wasn't significantly more valuable than the other products on the market. It wasn't differentiated enough to justify staking a reputation on it and charging customers real money. At least, not in the founder's opinion.

What it needed

To get there, the product needed somebody who wasn't me. It needed someone with experience outside of engineering, who could take the core systems and frameworks I had built for rapid improvement and aim them with real go-to-market expertise.

On our last call, the founder was clear that this wasn't a technical problem. It was about where you obsess in your free time. Some people have spent years obsessing over quiz funnels and Meta ads. They show up with years of painful lessons that we would have had to learn from scratch.

He was right. Hard work can speed you up. It can't replace years of painful lessons. I could have gotten the product to an 8 before launch. I couldn't get it to a 10 on the timeline that mattered.

How he handled it

The founder made a hard choice. Instead of continuing together to our launch date, just weeks away, he decided to part ways with me and the rest of the team.

He handled it the way a good leader should. He had clearly read The Hard Thing About Hard Things, specifically the parts about letting go of executives and key employees. He told me as soon as he'd made the decision. He didn't beat around the bush. He didn't leave room for debate. He said it how it is, and he took responsibility for what went wrong. He said it was on him for not vetting the go-to-market fit up front.

It wasn't my work ethic. He rated that S+ tier. It wasn't my engineering. He told me I had upgraded his thinking on building systems. I just wasn't the person who could take this product to a 10 on this timeline. That would take a different set of skills and expertise.

I didn't try to change his mind. It was his call. Instead, I asked for the thing that would actually help me: specific feedback on where the gaps were.

Taking the news was tremendously hard. It was also another valuable lesson in leadership.

We ended the call as friends. When I'm ready, he's buying the beer and we're playing pool.

Did I fail?

This is the first time I've ever been fired. After the first 10 minutes of self-loathing and questioning, I asked myself whether I had failed. I went through it honestly:

Did I give everything I had? Yes.
Did I grow, push, and inspire myself tremendously? Absolutely.
Did I act with agency, improve who I was, inspire those around me, and get inspired by inspiring people? Yes.
Did I fail to launch the business with the founder? Yes.
Is that my fault? No.
Do I wish it ended differently? Absolutely.

Lessons

If you're a founder going through something like this, here's what I'd pass on:

Dogfood your product. If using it annoys you, it will annoy your customers. Fix it before they find it.
Don't choose between building and selling. You used to have to. Not anymore. Learn both.
Take the break. My most productive two weeks came right after 10 days off.
Effort is not expertise. Hustle won't replace years of domain experience. Know where your obsession lives.
When you get let go, ask for feedback, not a reversal. The decision is made. The lessons are what you take with you.
When you let someone go, be direct and own your part. The founder showed me how to do it and keep the friendship.
Judge yourself on what you control. Effort, growth, and agency are yours. The outcome isn't entirely.

The bottom line

That's the way things go. If you're not willing to take the chance, if you're not willing to fail, you're never going to grow. You're never going to have agency. You're never going to achieve your biggest, wildest dreams.

I just got fired, and I'm incredibly proud.