A Founder’s Guide to Replacing Yourself

A few weeks ago I made my toughest HR decision yet: I fired myself

Entrepreneurs have plenty to worry about: raising enough capital, keeping competitors at bay, recruiting talent, acquiring paying customers, rising above the noise, defining new industries and keeping their teams focused on innovating. Another is the worry that your board of directors will shove you aside. Many founders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Pincus, have gone to great lengths to protect their positions as the leaders of the companies they built. These efforts include carefully selecting co-founders and entrepreneur-friendly investors as well as architecting stock structures and term sheets so that eternal control is all but guaranteed.

Given all of this, it can come as quite a surprise when you realize that, despite all the protective measures you put in place, you want to fire yourself.

About this time last year, I came to that very conclusion. A few weeks ago I stepped down from being CEO of the business I built. I am now the president and chief strategy officer and S. Brian Mukherjee is our new CEO. Brian, who joined Blinkx in 2011 when we acquired his company, is an inspiring leader and, I believe, the best person to take Blinkx to the next level.

I never saw myself as a quitter. Ben Horowitz from A16Z wrote a blog post a few weeks before I made my announcement, called “The Struggle”. In it, he talks about the dark moments entrepreneurs go through when they are building a start-up and things don’t turn out the way they had hoped. He describes the struggle as the Land of Broken Promises and Crushed Dreams. LinkedIn founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman calls this the Valley of the Shadow, alluding to a biblical passage often used in funerals.

Fighting your way through the valley can be harrowing. The gauntlet is thick with doubters and detractors. The technology forest is dark and deep and you need to fight your way past competitive warriors and financial dragons. Many entrepreneurs begin their ventures believing they will never meet such formidable times. For them, the valley is not kind.

Like all start-ups, Blinkx has been through tough times. This, however, is not one of them. Blinkx is publicly traded with a market cap of US$ 300 million. We employ nearly 300 people and are profitable. Last year, we grew more than 70% and brought in well over US$ 100 million of revenue. This makes it difficult to explain why I would want to step down.

I am an engineer. I like to build things. When I was seven, I taught myself how to code in BASIC and wrote my own video games. Unlike most hackers-in-the-making, I was equally excited about how to turn my games into a business. I designed elaborate credit sequences, made plans about where and how I would distribute my games and what I would name the new company that would sell them.

Decades later, I co-founded Blinkx in 2004 and launched the video search engine in 2005 to great fanfare. Two years later, we took the company public in London. The capital we raised from the stock offering allowed us to innovate new online video advertising technologies and build a global sales team. We introduced new search tools for consumers and video ad units for advertisers, and became the leader in white label video search for AOL, Ask.com and Real.

Growth at Blinkx was fast and furious. At one point, I was flying to London twice a month to talk to investors, as well as to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles for meetings. I was invited to conferences from Monaco to Maui, delivering keynotes to audiences of thousands of people.

Then I hit a wall. In April 2011, I was in London negotiating the acquisition of Burst Media. We ran into some delays with the deal. At one point, I looked up at the room service trays strewn about me and realized I hadn’t left my hotel room in 48 hours.

While I was abroad, our CTO met with an early partner who had always pushed us to do more. They were brainstorming future products and new directions for the industry. It was the type of meeting I used to live for, but I was too busy dealing with term sheets to be a part of it. I felt like a part of me was missing. Instead of thinking about the future of video online, I was worrying about legal, HR and investor issues.

A few weeks later, after another trip to London for an earnings road show, I told my board what I was thinking.

The hardest part of this transition is when I tell outsiders about my decision. People assume no one would voluntarily step back from running their own company. When they hear you are no longer CEO, they assume you must have been shoved aside or, worse – gasp! – you do not have enough ambition.

There is nothing rational about starting a truly innovative company. Most who try will fail miserably. If you want to do it, you need a deeper passion that overrules common sense. If you don’t keep that flame alive, you run the risk of ruining what you have built. At times like that, replacing yourself is the next disruptive move.

I love that I was able to turn my inspiration into reality and that I am still an active part of its future. For all we know, this could just be the beginning.

 

 Author: Suranga Chandratillake founded blinkx, the Video Search Engine, in 2005 and took it public in 2007, serving as CEO from start-up through to July 2012.  Suranga is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (Class of 2009).@suranga_blinkx

*A longer version of this blog appeared here.

www.surangac.com

Photo Credit: Reuters Pictures