The Story of How My 3 Partners Left My Company
What you can do to keep going.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” ― Epictetus
I had the experience of having my three initial partners leaving the company that we founded together.
Starting a business alone is very difficult. It is good to have more people helping you. Having someone to share the entrepreneurial life’s pains, especially in the beginning, is very important.
Having a business partner is like having a romantic partner. You won’t agree with everything; you’ll fight; you’ll get mad. Relationships are hard, but you hope that they will last forever. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, though.
Story
I first had the idea of starting a gaming company in 2010. As I was doing college of Digital Games (it’s like Computer Science, but focused on games), I tried developing some independent games, but nothing worked. In 2011, I asked one of my teammates from the company I worked for to join me, and we started working on some freelance projects. During the same year, I asked another two teammates to join us. We were three programmers and one graphic designer.
I was about to graduate from college at the end of the year, and I was saying to my three future partners that we should quit the company where we were working for and start our own. None of them wanted to do that, though. As December arrived, I took the initiative and quit my job. One month later, all of them have also quit their jobs.
We founded a gaming company in Brazil in February of 2012. We wanted to make money with our own games, but we had to do some work for hire projects to survive. Thanks to a teacher from college, we got a huge client for my company that would pay an extraordinary amount for who was just starting. That money also meant a lot of work, but that was something that I already was used to doing.
That money inflated my ego, and I started hiring more people, even not being able to pay much. At some point, we were a total of 11 people. I liked the idea of seeing the office full of people working. It was a fool vanity metric as we were still struggling to survive. A room full of people doesn’t mean you are a successful entrepreneur.
We didn’t have any focus at the beginning. We were trying to do much different stuff. As a gaming company, we developed our own game, but it wasn’t making any money. At the same time, we worked on the project for this huge client and other small projects to pay the bills. Our days were a mess.
After one year of working hard, we read the news about a gaming company from Germany that wanted to hire a whole team from Brazil. It seemed nice, but I didn’t want to become an employee of another gaming company. We still had a lot of work to do as entrepreneurs. However, one of my partners insisted that we applied and he ended up doing a freelance project for the German company.
I was naive and didn’t know at the time that the freelance project was, in fact, a test for him to join the company. He spent one week working in the German company’s office, and after a few weeks after coming back, he said that he would leave our company to join the German one. I was shocked that he gave up the goal of making money with his own company.
As he left the company, I needed to find someone to replace his function. He was a graphic designer, and it is not cheap to hire people for that function here. Luckily, I have just met another graphic designer that wanted to work with games, and he ended up working with us as a freelancer for a while. He was the one that created the art for the characters for our game that helped in the future make our company profitable.
After the first partner left the company, we started developing a new game for Facebook. We were still struggling. At this point, most of the people I hired have left the company as we could not keep paying them.
Six months later, another partner decided to leave the company. He was going to come back to his former job, where we used to work together. He had a wife and needed to make more money. I was less shocked when that happened, but not happy.
This partner was a programmer, and he was mostly working with the back end. As we had an employee doing the same job, it was easier to adapt with one less person.
When my second partner left, I started to think about what would happen if my last partner also left. I began to think about the worse that could happen and what I could do to keep the company alive. I did this exercise several times in my head for many things about the company.
We are not used to preparing for the worst, but I believe that doing so can help us deal better with entrepreneurial life challenges. I’m a very optimistic person. It was difficult for me to start thinking about the worse. As I started doing that, I was able to solve problems faster and avoid toxic thoughts.
Being an entrepreneur is to live a life of uncertainty. You never know if what you are about to do is going to work. We always hope for the best, but rarely are we prepared for the worst. Entrepreneurship is a long-term emotional game. We must learn how to deal with our feelings.
Three months later, we finally launch our new game on Facebook. I was happy with our launch. The game wasn’t making any money yet, but I believed it could do so in the future. Because of that, we started developing a version of the game for mobile devices.
Three months later, my last partner told me that he also was going to come to his former job. When he started giving me the news, I was already prepared for that, and instead of worrying about him leaving, I started thinking about the things that I had to do now.
In less than a day, I had a new strategy for the company. I would get rid of the office and focus on the game for Facebook we just launched. I had two employees at the time that would help me. That was the beginning of 2014, two years later that we started the company.
This last partner was a programmer more focused on the game itself, like me. That meant I would have a lot more work to do. As I didn’t want to give up on the company, I was ready for the challenge. That helped me learn how to prioritize my work better, as we had fewer people working with the company now.
Takeaways
There is bad news that may come to be good in the future. My initial three partners are excellent professionals, but they weren’t a good fit for the company. Cultural fit is more important than technical skills. That is something you should be concerned about when you look for partners or hire employees. It took me a while to find new partners that I believed had a cultural fit with my company.
One year after my initial three partners left, I finally achieved the goal of having a profitable company. Our games were making enough money to pay me, my employees, and all of our bills. We kept growing, and one more year later, we raised US$1 million to help us grow even more.
Being alone taught me to focus on the right things and to find people complementary to me. As my gaming company grew, I invited people with the necessary skills to help solve the main problem that the company was currently experiencing:
- In early 2015, a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) joined to help our games reach more people and sell more;
- In early 2017, a COO (Chief Operations Officer) joined to help organize our processes;
- At the end of 2017, a CCO (Chief Creative Officer) joined to help improve our creative side to develop better games.
Because of this, I was able to share a lot of the pressure I had. I could also work on things that I could bring more value to the company.
Preparing for the worst was one of the main things that helped me go through the entrepreneurial challenges. As you think about what may go wrong, you have time to create a plan while you are not in the eye of the storm. Thinking like that helped me to be calmer to make crucial decisions for the future of the company.
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