Sam Jacobs

speaker

42 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2021 last heard Aug 2021

Sam Jacobs’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Want to Leave Your Job? Here's What to Ask Yourself First. · 4 Aug 2021 podcast

Thanks for having me, JR.

Glad to be here.

Well, I was there for about 18 months.

And the thing that made me decide to leave was that one day I came into work and our VP of engineering, who was a co-founder of the business, had run a financial model that indicated that we would be out of money in the next two months.

And that was terrifying.

And at the same time, another co-founder who also was a VP, all of us were kind of vice president level people reporting to an outside CEO that had been hired.

Another VP said, okay, everybody has to take a pay cut.

We're going to go into kind of battle mode.

And I wasn't making enough money at the time to be able to sustain a pay cut.

And I was a little terrified that the business would go under.

And that's why I decided to take certain conversations that had been happening more seriously.

Well, after I left, a couple things happened.

I didn't learn a tremendous amount about the finances.

They did a big reduction in force, so they fired a lot of people and got smaller.

They also fired the CEO, and they promoted the VP of engineering, the person that had run the model to figure out that they were going to run out of money.

They promoted him to be CEO, and that was, for a little while, the last that I heard of the company.

And then it was a couple months later, I started getting a flurry of text messages congratulating me.

And that was because the company had been sold to a much larger conglomerate.

And presumably, a lot of my relationships, a lot of my network thought that I had just had a windfall, that I just made a lot of money.

But the reality was that I had not chosen to exercise my options upon departure because I felt like the company wasn't going to make it.

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