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“Are you having fun?” Bob Dobkin, our only angel investor, asked me when I was giving him an update on our progress about two months after we closed our Series A funding.
Bob was the co-founder and CTO/VP Engineering of Linear Technology. Linear was arguably the most successful analog semiconductor company of the last 30 years. It was coup having Bob involved with our company.
“I’m having the time of my life, Bob,” I answered.
And I was having the time of my life. It was fun recruiting and building the team. It was fun working with the engineering team on developing our products. In fact, even dealing with the company’s problems was sort of fun.
You’d better enjoy dealing with problems because you’re going to have a lot of problems to deal with on your journey. For example…
You have to be prepared to deal with employee issues as a CEO.
A few months later, I called Bob. He answered the phone as he always did, “Hi Brett!”
“Bob, I fired ‘Randy’ today.” Randy was my co-founder, and he had introduced me to Bob.
“What happened?” Bob asked me.
“Randy was getting into fights with the whole management team, so I had to let him go.”
