I once worked at a company that was privately owned. We had built a new product that was gonna be wildly successful.
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.
Ian Brown @igb
To be fair, I should be grateful. If that company hadn’t failed then I wouldn’t have gotten to work at @twitter.
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On the other hand, if that company hadn’t failed then I wouldn’t have had to work again.