Has Quitting Culture Now Crossed Into Founder CEOs?

So there’s a quiet trend I’ve observed for a while but didn’t want to call a trend.  Didn’t want to see it as a new thing.  But I think it is.

It’s the founder CEO quitting.

Even after raising $20m, $50, $200m+ in venture capital.  Even with 100 of employees and 1000s of customers counting on them.

I guess it’s not totally new.  This stuff is hard.  And it’s even harder for folks running unicorns and close-to-unicorns that have seen growth slow radically.

But founder-CEOs are supposed to get going when it gets tough.  To somehow, find a way to turn it around.

I wasn’t even a great founder, but I turned near-death experiences around twice to strong exits.  So did so many of the leaders we look up to.  Their start-ups almost failed, too.

Quitting Culture is a real thing, it’s all over Tik Tok, it’s become endemic in sales teams in particular.  Part of it is blaming someone else for your own shortcomings.  Blaming the VCs, the CEO, the markets, the “downturn”, anything but yourself.

So I recently noted that 2 founder CEOs I’ve known for years that raised $50m+ each just … aren’t CEOs anymore.  They weren’t forced out by their VCs, at least not directly.  They just had enough. One is doing YouTubes. The other seed investing.  Hooray.

There’s also a most invisible version.  Two CEOs I invested in basically just gave their startups to other companies, even with many millions left in the bank.  So they could just give up.

Perhaps this is just part of the normalization of start-ups.

The only thing I can tell you, as someone who has thought about quitting a few times but never did … is you can often fight your way back.

Recently Andy Wilson, founder-CEO of Logikcull, and I did a deep dive here.  I was the first investor in Logikcull, and after being a rocketship, growth stalled — for years.  Andy had to reboot the entire sales team and GTM, and reboot the product.  It was brutal.  But they didn’t quit.  And a few years later, they sold the company for almost $300,000,000:

It would have been worth $0 if they’d quit.

Don’t waste those years.