Without Him
It was 2015, I think. The CEO at the time told us he was ready to step down. Family reasons.
The company had lasted fifteen years. Six of us had founded it together. He ran it as CEO, another friend handled sales, I oversaw the technology. The plan — unspoken but understood — was that I would take over when he left. Nobody said it. Everyone assumed it.
Let me rewind a bit.
Early twenties. The first venture I'd joined as a student part-timer ran out of money and let me go. I needed another gig. A friend of mine was working at a small contract development shop in Omori, and put in a word for me.
That's where I met him. A few years older, a full-stack engineer before the term existed. He looked after people, he could write code, he was lazy, and he handed everything off — but in the end he'd always get it done himself. I'd never met anyone like him. Maybe our personalities were similar. We hit it off fast and started hanging out a lot.
The company was a Java shop. I was deep into Perl and felt out of place. When I griped about it, he said: well, let's just start our own.
He must have had a way with people. They came together almost overnight. Six of us pooled our money. And we had a company. He'd be the CEO. Everyone had a strong personality, and every one of them could have made it solo. Except me.
Most ventures fold within a few years. Ours lasted fifteen. Luck was part of it, but I think the founding members being good at what they did was too. As the years passed, roles settled, and at some point I'd become the person looking after everything technical. He, as CEO, was lazy in the best way — handed everything off. Which is how the rest of us grew up.
Back to 2015. He said he was leaving.
I thought it through, and I stepped down too. There were voices saying I should take over. But with him leaving, the reason I'd stayed was gone.
There was another reason. I wanted to see the outside world. I'd spent my twenties and thirties holed up in a small company. I had no idea how good I really was. I could write code, more or less. I had experience running whole projects as a PM. I wanted to find out how that played outside.
A colleague took over as CEO. The business slid not long after, and another company absorbed it.
I won't say I feel no responsibility. I think there might have been other choices. Maybe taking over would have changed things. Maybe not.
But I don't regret it. It was a company that existed because of him. I grew up as a technician riding on his reputation and his habit of handing things off. A company without him was already a different company. Whoever ran it, the result probably would have been the same.
Ten years have passed. The outside world is bigger than I'd thought, and I'm not as good as I'd hoped, and not as bad as I'd feared. About what you'd expect.