Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Journey is the Destination

Three years ago today, I left my MD role at Hummer Winblad to join Widgetbox. While Widgetbox grew into Flite, the leader in cloud-based advertising , I too have grown in ways I could not imagine.

While a VC, I worked on a deal that focused on testing wafers. The state of the art was to test the circuitry of a quarter wafer. This new company offered the promise of a full-wafer test.

The metaphor is meaningful to me. The CEO role tests one's skills, leadership, tenacity, and self-awareness in ways not possible in other jobs. Through each test, each challenge...hidden parts of who you are, what you are made of...reveal themselves.

The last three years have tested me in ways I did not think possible. The journey of company building, restructuring, and scaling both deepen who you are, while simultaneously revealing how you react to challenge, how you exploit advantage and insight, how you handle the good, the bad, and the ambiguous.

Three amazing years. Three years of better learning who I am.

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