The author detailed precisely why I left a former Y-Combinator company, Return Path.
"As far as I can tell, what happens at these companies is that they started by concentrating almost totally on product growth. That’s completely and totally reasonable, because companies are worth approximately zero when they’re founded; they don’t bother with things that protect them from losses, like good ops practices or actually having security, because there’s nothing to lose.
The result is a culture where people are hyper-focused on growth and ignore risk. That culture tends to stick even after company has grown to be worth well over a billion dollars, and the companies have something to lose. Anyone who comes into one of these companies from Google, Amazon, or another place with solid ops practices is shocked. Often, they try to fix things, and then leave when they can’t make a dent."
I left it open-ended, actually. I talked to the CDO and explained why I was leaving. He agreed with the decision and thanked me for being brave enough to stand up and say it.
It ended up being three weeks before we agreed that I'd successfully handed off everything.
No bad feelings either way -- I'd joined the company because they had said that they wanted to 'grow up,' but that was a feeling percolating up from below. The lower levels of the company wanted to grow up and stop firefighting all the time. The top levels of the company would fight you every last way.
Wow have I ever been there, done that at a startup you've heard of. Line level employees hated the endless firefighting; the ceo/cto didn't give a shit and stymied any change. My solution was to forfeit any ops duty at all. I told my boss she had two choices: I didn't work on ops or I didn't work there at all.
"As far as I can tell, what happens at these companies is that they started by concentrating almost totally on product growth. That’s completely and totally reasonable, because companies are worth approximately zero when they’re founded; they don’t bother with things that protect them from losses, like good ops practices or actually having security, because there’s nothing to lose.
The result is a culture where people are hyper-focused on growth and ignore risk. That culture tends to stick even after company has grown to be worth well over a billion dollars, and the companies have something to lose. Anyone who comes into one of these companies from Google, Amazon, or another place with solid ops practices is shocked. Often, they try to fix things, and then leave when they can’t make a dent."