Five years, one acquisition, three lessons
This one’s a bit different. If you’ve followed my writing, you’ve probably noticed the long silence — and I owe you an honest explanation: I was busy. Not the performative kind of busy, the kind where you look up and realize years have passed. This isn’t a technical post or a framework or a how-to. Think of it as an interlude. An intermission between chapters. Something I needed to write before I could figure out what comes next.
I spent nearly five years at StrongDM. Long enough to see it grow from an early-stage company into something real. Long enough to build a team, ship meaningful products, and feel the weight of what it takes to scale.
I joined because it was one of those rare opportunities where the problem mattered, the ambition was clear, and the early signals on the team were strong. In hindsight, that last part mattered more than anything else.
Last month StrongDM was acquired.
When the acquisition became real internally, my reaction wasn’t what most people expect. It wasn’t some overwhelming sense of victory or finality. It was quieter than that. A mix of immense pride in what we built, gratitude for the people, and a sharp awareness of just how much I’d poured into the work — the hiring calls, the hard sprints, the culture we’d shaped together over years.
Over time, what stayed with me wasn’t the milestone itself. It was how we got there. Five years is long enough to learn a few things the hard way, and when I distill it down, three lessons keep surfacing.
The first is deceptively simple: talent density is everything. Not in the abstract, but in the day-to-day reality of how a team operates. High talent density compresses time. Decisions happen faster. The quality bar stays high without constant enforcement. You don’t need layers of process because the people themselves are the system.
Once you’ve experienced that kind of density, it permanently changes your expectations. You develop very little tolerance for environments where it isn’t present — not out of arrogance, but because you’ve seen what’s possible when it is.
The second is about focus, especially during turbulent periods — which, in startups, is most of the time. There were moments of uncertainty, shifting priorities, external pressures, and the usual chaos that comes with building something from nothing. It’s easy in those moments to get pulled into things you don’t control: market narratives, funding dynamics, organizational noise.
The only thing that consistently worked was narrowing the aperture. Focus on what you can control. For me, that was building a great product and building a great team. Everything else — timelines, outcomes, acquisitions — sits downstream of that.
The third is about perseverance and grit — the kind that doesn’t get talked about in retrospectives because it’s not glamorous. Startups will test you in ways that are hard to explain until you’ve lived through them. Missed quarters. Missed deadlines. Key people leaving at the worst possible moment. Macroeconomic conditions shifting overnight and rewriting the rules you’d been playing by. There were stretches at StrongDM where the emotional weight of it was genuinely heavy — where showing up and holding the line for your team required something closer to stubbornness than strategy.
That takes a toll. It’s cumulative, and it’s personal. You absorb more than you realize at the time — the pressure of a quarter that didn’t land, the gut punch of losing someone you fought hard to hire, the slow grind of leading through uncertainty when you don’t have all the answers yourself. Grit isn’t a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a practice. It’s choosing to keep going when the rational case for optimism is thin, because you believe in what you’re building and in the people building it alongside you. I even had to send myself motivational emails to push through some of these hard times :)
As I think about what comes next, these are the things I’m carrying forward. Not the mechanics of the acquisition, but the conviction that small, high-density teams can outperform much larger ones. That focus beats noise, especially when things get messy. And that building the right environment matters more than almost anything else.
Before any of that, though, I’m taking a break. A real one. Five years of building at startup intensity takes a toll that’s easy to rationalize in the moment and impossible to ignore once you stop. The truth is, sustained high performance requires recovery — and I got better at preaching that to my teams than practicing it myself. So for now, I’m stepping back, recharging, and giving myself the space to figure out what the next chapter looks like without rushing into it.
I’m deeply grateful to the team at StrongDM — for the craftsmanship, the intensity, and the way we pushed each other to be better. With a team like that, a lot more is possible than people think.
For now, onto diving the Forgotten Islands of the Banda Sea. See you in May!