Ian Brown on X: "I once worked at a company that was privately owned. We had built a n…"

Ian Brown @igb

I once worked at a company that was privately owned. We had built a new product that was gonna be wildly successful.

4:42 AM · Oct 4, 2022 View on Twitter ↗

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No, seriously, it really was. A *great* idea at *the* right time. It would have transformed the then-nascent cloud and made all of us rich.

The founder/owner/CEO, however, wanted to pivot the company away from the product to build a protocol instead.

And so we pivoted. Stopped working on the product. Fired the folks driving the first mover in a soon-to-be-a-multi-billion-dollar market.

The protocol never gained traction. The company shut down a year or so later.

It was such an amazing waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

What’s that? Why am I taking this particular trip down memory lane?

Oh, no reason.

No reason at all.

To be fair, I should be grateful. If that company hadn’t failed then I wouldn’t have gotten to work at @twitter.

On the other hand, if that company hadn’t failed then I wouldn’t have had to work again.