John’s Crux Point
While scouting entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa, I'd become excited about the potential to develop and direct much greater early stage investment capital into the region. But returning to Silicon Valley, I found it much harder than I expected, and than I believed fair, to stimulate enthusiasm for the entrepreneurs and new ventures being created in Africa. I kept hearing fears of the potential instability in the region. I decided to dig deeper into those fears, and to see if I could do anything to alleviate those concerns.
What resulted was a five year, intense adventure to build a new company that reduced conflict and the potential for armed violence in sub-Saharan Africa.
After self funding for a few years, and then raising a few million dollars from prominent individual investors, we'd managed to build a repeatable process for removing tens of thousands of assault weapons from circulation, dramatically reducing potential gun deaths and violence.
It felt like a perilous decision.
It was a head spinning circuit of non stop travel between places like DR Congo, Switzerland, and the philanthropy set in New York City. The vision was becoming real, and we'd built supporters and advocates and customers and contributors around the world. I was working seven days a week, 14 or 16 hours a day. It was exciting, exhausting, energizing, fulfilling, scary, and seductive all at once.
Eventually, I found that my ideas, and my co-founder's, no longer aligned. We struggled over control of key strategic decisions. The disagreement threatened to destroy what I had spent years sacrificing to create, just as it was finally all starting to click. The choice became clear: continue to battle and put our programs, customers, beneficiaries, and investors at risk. Or step away from personal involvement in a way that would allow our business and non-profit operations to continue to operate on behalf of the people we'd designed the company to help.
I chose to step away.
It felt like a perilous decision.
I'd not thought of nearly anything else except the company I was building for years.
It felt like giving up my identity, my passion for the work, my daily contact with people I cared deeply about. And I had no idea what could possibly come next that would be anywhere near as fulfilling.
Letting go meant stepping into a void, with no obvious replacement for my sense of purpose, and little confidence that anything could be as meaningful again. But it was the right choice.
As creative people, the journey towards purposeful work is fraught. It's easy to become attached to a particular vision, especially when we've sunk all of our energy, money, and identity into achieving that vision. It's hard to start over. Reaching the summit of our highest ideals and aspirations requires us, though, to be willing to climb back down sometimes, and find the patience to find a different, better way up.