Don McGuire

because I just couldn't be in that environment or I couldn't work for this person and their moral code or their values or whatever it was were misaligned with mine.

So I had to make those adjustments and it was painful and it hurt.

And you almost have to press the reset button and then pick yourself up and start over in some ways.

A lot of people go through that.

And again, it serves you well as you decide where you're heading.

Career paths and life paths are not single-laned and linear.

Especially not right now.

You know, you got to zig to the right, you got to zig to the left.

And, you know, sometimes you feel like, oh, I'm really not going anywhere.

But then all of a sudden, boop, you know, you've made advancement.

Yeah, the startup bug is a bug that I would say in some ways you should avoid.

When I decided to get the startup bug, I had three small children and a mortgage and a lot of responsibilities.

And it turns out that, you know, like most startups, again, great experience, learned a lot, but it didn't work out.

And so I found myself one day working

with that moment of what am I going to do, right?

How am I going to feed my family?

How am I going to make my mortgage?

And luckily, again, I had built up a reputation and I made so many friends and built such a network within the tech industry that as soon as I made the decision to pull the rip cord on a very bad toxic situation, inbound came my way.

Oh, I heard you're leaving.

What are you going to do?