Eoghan McCabe: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, okay. Very difficult to actually do even if things don't feel like they're growing anymore. So, first of all, just what was the moment, if there was one, of just like, okay, the six-week experiment of someone building a Fin internally, was that being like, this is it, or was there another moment of like, let's go all in on this? It was the combination of the company being older, us all, me and the founders being impatient like, are we going to make something out of this? We went through a time when the company was worth a lot. We're private so we don't have a daily mark to market, but all the other public software companies dropped 80%, 85, 90%. We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits. We were in low single digits. And so part of it was, let's do something here. Another part of it was my own anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that I made myself. I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding CEOs do to placate employees or do it out fear to bring investors along, following advice in the industry and best practices. You betray your intuition in little bits and pieces over the years when the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big, unstoppable, scary corporate beast and a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way. If you could pick in your mind three or four tech darlings from 10 years ago when you meet the CEO and talk to them privately, very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work. All of them have betrayed themselves in little ways, and I had left the business, I was super sick, I was burned out frankly from the revenue even having started to slow down before I left. I had been attacked unfairly in the press, just all of me was just fed up and I decided to take a very authoritarian, top-down, aggressive founder-first approach to all the things, and I found that deeply cathartic and that was the thing that led to me in part. The other was just good old-fashioned logic and the other was desperation saying, we're doing the AI thing, the AI thing, exciting and sexy. We need some new energy thing here. The new AI thing makes sense. And also just my intuition says, go for it. And so when people tell these stories, they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they support their own self-aggrandized narratives about their brilliance. Actually, it's a big messy cocktail of things. And anyway, that's my attempt at explaining the cocktail. I saw a stat that when you first launched, when you first had this kind of prototype, you were losing money on every transaction that you're charging like a dollar, it cost you $120, something like that.…

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