Simone Stolzoff

And yet the founder felt in his heart of hearts that the business wasn't on the right track, that it wasn't sustainable.

And so he did something that others thought was crazy.

At sort of the peak of the company's success, he decided to shut it down.

And he made his investors whole.

He gave employees that wanted to leave the option to leave.

And then he took the employees that remained and pivoted the business around something that was completely in a different industry, which is while they were building the game, they had built this communications tool to be able to collaborate while they were trying to make the game a thing.

And that communications tool ended up becoming Slack.

And that founder, Stuart Butterfield...

The company sold for $27.5 billion to Salesforce.

It became one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies of all time.

But in interviews, she said, we didn't know that this was going to be the next big thing.

I didn't know in the moment that shutting down Glitch was the right move, but we discovered the opportunity.

We discovered the possibility that lived on the other side of my uncertainty by being able to turn toward that uncertainty.

And I think that is the upside of uncertainty.

We often think about the fear or the threatening nature of the uncertain moments in our life, when in actuality, uncertainty can also be the birthplace of possibility.

And if you're willing to turn toward that unknown, you might discover something that is greater than anything that you would have imagined before.

That's quite a vision.

Totally.

But it ended up being a big bet.

It's what statisticians call overcoming a local maxima.