[scientician]

I have a story:

My cofounder was more Salesy than me, so he did most of the relationship management with our clients and gatekeepers. To grease these relationships, he was always ... I tried typing a few euphemisms for "LYING" there. Overpromising, for sure.

This worked really well because it was SALES LYING, and I was in the back working my ass off the make those sales lies come true. I delivered, no one was the wiser. I'm proud of the work I did. Things were going well, people were impressed, we were gaining customers, and new lines of business.

Then he decided that if he could lie to others, he could lie to me. Lie after lie after lie until I didn't even know if the company numbers were true. They weren't, as our wiser readers probably already guessed.

I made the mistake of accepting this behaviour in the name of success. HUGE mistake.

Eventually I was forced to confront him when his lies created serious safety issues for our clients. He blew up and became extremely angry, and our relationship ended that day.

[matte_black]

What happened next??

[scientician]

I took two years off to recover from the burnout.

Our market was/is (I need a better word than corrupt) such that business couldn't continue without his relationship massaging. I tried to talk to the gatekeepers, but they wouldn't even acknowledge me. I suspect he instructed them, I'll never know.

He tried to hire minimum wage contractors to replace me, and he found out the business couldn't work without actual expertise. This surprised him and pissed off the clients he was trying to keep - he promised the best and delivered incompetence.

We have not spoken since.

---

As for me... I'm not founding any more for-profit companies any time soon. Instead, I have found 'my place' at [Sudbury Model Schools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school) and plan to make my life about advancing human rights for students. Our countries need leadership, and our industrial schooling model is not capable of producing it. For our liberal democracies, this is an existential threat.

A note on Sudbury Schools: the ideas that seem so natural to them in that environment are actually radical and difficult to grasp for most people who went through traditional schooling. It is not fast or easy to understand, it takes while to 'click'. If you take the time to understand what they're doing, you'll be rewarded.

To that end, I would recommend one of the original founders' latest book, a retrospective of the decades the schools have been in operation: [A Place to Grow](http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/place-grow) (If you click to 'Sample Chapter', you'll be able to read a significant fraction of the book for free.)

:)