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“Take your stuff,” Carlos the HR VP said to me after he asked me to leave the boardroom where the company’s operations meeting was taking place.
I picked up my stuff, and I started walking out of the conference room. There were twenty sets of eyes trained on me including the CEO’s eyes.
I instantly knew what was happening: I was being fired in a very public way.
Actually, it turned out I was being laid off, but when you’re a reduction in force of one it’s safe to say you’ve been fired.
I went home that Friday afternoon, and I thought about what I wanted to do next. I honestly didn’t know what I wanted except to work with really good people.
So I reached out to my network, and I sent them a short note saying, “I’m available.”
A lot people reached out to me about various job opportunities. None of the opportunities were really that exciting. They were just jobs.
I’d had enough jobs already in my career, and I really didn’t want another. It was still unclear to me what I did want.
So I kept networking.
The managing partner of a VC fund based in San Francisco asked me to spend the day with him and his team. I assumed we would be talking about…
