Okay, so. Yesterday in my last post I said the next post would explain where I've been. Grab your coffee. Or the whiskey. This one earns it. I'm usually the loud one in here. The 1 AM experiments, the folder systems, the posts that run longer than some of your contracts. Then about a month ago I went quiet, and quiet is not my natural state. My natural state is "please, someone make him stop." June 24 was the day the wheels came off. That morning I sat down and let our project manager go. If you've never had to do it, no amount of business books prepares you for the part where there's a real person on the other side of the screen and you're the one changing their whole year. One of those conversations you rehearse in the shower for a week and it still comes out sideways. We handled it with as much care as we could, offered the strong recommendation he honestly earned, and it still sat on my chest the rest of the day. Except the day wasn't done. A few hours later, the strongest CMO on my team gave me a 30-day notice. Same. Day. Two seats gone before dinner. Every founder in here knows the math that starts running in your head at that moment, and none of it is about marketing. ******************************************* Then it got personal. ******************************************* My wife was two weeks past her due date with our newest baby. If you've lived a two-weeks-past-due house, you know the whole family walks around holding its breath. When labor finally started, the plan was a peaceful home birth. What we got was a chaotic ambulance ride and four days in the NICU. Not because the baby needed it. Because the medical system is run by insurance companies and litigation attorneys, and "healthy baby" apparently isn't a discharge criteria anymore. Four days of asking strangers for permission to take home our own healthy kid. When we brought up leaving against medical advice, the not-so-subtle response from the doctors included the words "child protective services." We're not talking about a sick baby.