This wasn't the first time I'd been completely on my own with something I had no idea how to handle. And it wouldn't be the last.
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See you next Tuesday.
Cheers
Xaver
PS: First time reading? I sold my AI company for €60M and now write about the reality of building companies, burnout, and life after an exit. Free article every Tuesday.
Today’s article is presented by Aircall.
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In 2021, a few months after we were acquired by a NASDAQ company in the US, a C-level executive from that company called me up.
“Xaver, I have bad news. As you might have seen, our stock has been tumbling. We ran all the numbers worldwide. We have to ask you to cut 80 people from your team. Not only you - it impacts all offices worldwide.”
I remember the silence after he finished speaking.
My heart didn’t race. It just sort of... stopped.
I had just come out of burnout. Months of barely functioning, of taking one call a day and slowly working my way back up. I was fragile in a way most people around me couldn’t see. And now this.
I wanted to ask him what I was supposed to do. Whether there was a process. Whether someone from HR in the US would help coordinate things. Whether anyone would show up and help me carry this.
I didn’t ask. Because I already knew the answer.
Nobody was coming…
Not the board. Not the acquirers. Not our investors. They were all dealing with their own versions of the same collapse. The market had turned, and everyone was looking inward.
It was just me, my co-founder, and a list of 80 names.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot since then.
Not the firing itself - that’s its own story. But the specific feeling of the pause between hanging up the phone and deciding to start moving.
That pause is where you find out who you actually are.
Because in that moment, I had two choices. Wait for someone to come and make it less painful. Or accept that they weren’t coming and start figuring out how to do it anyway.
There was no playbook. We had never done anything close to this before. We had no HR department experienced in mass layoffs. We had people who had been with us since the beginning - people we knew personally, whose kids we’d heard about, whose apartment moves we’d helped celebrate.
So we just kind of started.
We talked to lawyers. To other founders. We googled. We designed the process ourselves. We rehearsed conversations we had never had and hoped we wouldn’t say or do the wrong thing.
Eventually, we sat down, one person every five minutes, and we did it.
I’ve noticed this pattern keeps repeating.
Not always at the same scale, but the shape of it is the same.
When I left my second company, I had no idea what came next. Nobody handed me a roadmap for that.
So I started asking friends and other founders who had been through something similar. I read about burnout and identity and what rebuilding actually looks like. I tried things. Built some apps in the health space. Learned to code a little. Most of it went nowhere, but it got me moving.
When I started writing and wasn’t sure anyone would read it, no mentor appeared to tell me it would work out.
When I took on my first coaching clients and felt completely out of my depth, I had experience - but coaching is its own skill. I had to build it from scratch.
…
Each time, there was the same pause. That small window where part of me was still waiting for someone to show up with the answer.
They never did.
And at some point, I stopped being surprised by that. Stopped waiting for it.
What this means
Most founders don’t talk about this part.
We talk about resilience and hard days. But usually in a way that makes it sound handled. Like we always knew what to do next. Like the hard part was execution, not the ten minutes before that where we had absolutely no idea where to start.
The truth is messier.
Most of the time, when something genuinely hard hit, my first instinct was to look around for someone who knew better. Someone more experienced, more prepared, more suited for exactly this problem.
A more seasoned CEO. A mentor who’d been through this before. An investor who could just tell me what to do.
And usually, there wasn’t one. Or there was, but they weren’t available. Or they gave me advice that didn’t quite fit my situation. Or I asked and got five different answers and still had to decide alone.
At some point I realized that’s just how it works.
Nobody has lived your exact situation. Nobody knows your team, your investors, your specific version of the problem. Even the best advice is just a starting point. You still have to take it and figure out what it means for you.
So you become the person who figures it out. Not because you’re particularly talented or brave. Just because there’s nobody else.
And the strange thing is, that process builds something. Like a quiet certainty that you’ve been here before and you moved anyway. That the pause doesn’t last forever. That you’re more capable of handling the next thing better than you think.
The honest part…
So what are you waiting for right now?
What’s the thing sitting on your list that you keep telling yourself needs more input, more guidance, more clarity before you can move?
Maybe it does. But probably it doesn’t.
You won’t figure it all out before you start. That’s not how it works. You figure it out by starting, and then adjusting, and then starting again.
