But he was. Still in shock, and with my hands shaking out of fear, I took the elevator to another floor for immediate te

I don’t remember the first time I told our board that I was exhausted and needed to step down as CEO. I imagine it was around 2016 or 2017, a period defined by stressful business decisions and physical and mental health issues. I later realized that the board interpreted my complaints as “typical founder/CEO exhaustion”. I blame myself for that lack of clarity. For years I did a poor job of communicating the depth of my stress and exhaustion, a problem only compounded by the fact that, at times, I wasn’t even sure of my own feelings. There were stretches of time where I felt horrible — lonely; terrified; depressed. Depression exacerbates exhaustion. But I tried to put on a brave face to make sure the board felt comfortable. There were also occasional periods where I felt joy, which complicated matters even more. The highs kept me going even though I knew the downs were unhealthy and untenable. It was hard for me to measure how much of my pain was because I had young kids at home, the result of specific business challenges or a classic case of founder/CEO exhaustion. What is normal? There was no way to answer that other than to go by my own feelings. From 2011–17, my exhaustion felt “normal”. Starting in 2017, it no longer did. I no longer felt like a missionary, I felt like a mercenary.

On October 13th 2020 I stepped down as CEO of CircleUp, the company I started in 2011 with my co-founder, Rory Eakin. Leaving the best job I ever had — at the company I helped to create — was difficult and confusing. I wish I had found other stories about how the transition actually went and what it felt like. But I found surprisingly few first-hand accounts from founders or CEOs transitioning from their initial role, and even fewer that shared their full, authentic story of what really happened when they left and how they truly felt about the process. With limited precedent to guide me, I found the process extremely hard to manage, both logistically and emotionally.

Over the past year, when I began telling team members, investors, LPs and other stakeholders about my transition, their first question was, inevitably, “Why?” I typically explained that the average founder/CEO of a startup is in the seat for less than five years; I had been with CircleUp for nine, and I was exhausted. But there was so much more to it than that.

Simultaneously, we were forced to deal with a board member who was beyond counterproductive. After we bought him out fully in 2019, I sent this feedback email detailing the ways in which he had disrupted our board and company. Dealing with this issue was one of the loneliest times I faced as a CEO. To be clear, this email is unlike anything I’ve sent in my life, and I’ve thought long and hard about the decision to share it. I’m not doing so to disparage the individual in question; the only objective is to help others who might find themselves in a similar situation. (Nothing has been removed, including typos, from the email except for names.)

One of those tests revealed unexpected, terrifying information. I was diagnosed with cancer. I only remember a pair of words from the first conversation with my doctor: “two tumors”. I struggled to process it at first. I barely drink, have never smoked or done drugs and work out five times a week. How could I have cancer? The doctor must not have been speaking clearly.

It started with absolutely brutal fertility issues that my wife and I went through, beginning in 2016. As far back as college, I’ve made hard decisions with the goal of building a great family. That emphasis has impacted everything from which jobs I’ve pursued to what foods I’ve eaten — even before I was married. So you can imagine how those fertility issues impacted me and my wife, Kim. We met with five or six of the best fertility clinics in the country. There were so many tests. Eventually, we were blessed with our second child, but it was an extremely painful and isolating process.

The root of these negative feelings can be boiled down to roughly an 18-month period from mid-2016 through 2017. During that time, we pivoted CircleUp away from the original marketplace. We also had to go through a round of layoffs, the first I’d ever had to navigate as a CEO. They were necessary, but they were brutal. The people we let go had joined because they believed in our product and mission. They had done nothing wrong, yet suddenly there was no longer a place for them. I remember letting go of someone I had known since college. She turned to me and said, “I took this job over something that paid more, and now what should I do?” These agonising decisions kept me up at night for weeks, and I know it was much harder on those affected.

That group of professional challenges was more difficult than anything else I’ve faced in my career. At the time, I told a teammate that it felt like I was playing seven-dimensional chess because of the complexity of the negotiations combined with so many conflicting challenges at work. What she didn’t know — and what most people didn’t know — is that during that same 18-month window, I was also juggling personal challenges that were far more stressful than the hurdles at work.

That’s why I’m writing this blog. I’m sure I didn’t do everything right in executing my transition, but that isn’t the point. I’m not here to share a playbook — I don’t think one exists. I want to share my experiences and vulnerabilities with full candor in the hope that other founders can have a resource that I lacked; that they can learn from my experience and feel less lonely than I have through this process. I also hope this piece can help build greater empathy and understanding among the investors, teams and families that have backed, supported and lived with founders whose struggles might at first seem opaque or impenetrable but are, in essence, deeply human.

I hope that helps you in your daily routine as a software developer, being important stuff to save your time every time you have to create Vue JS 3.0 Asp.Net Core 5.0 application.

After creating the project, the only thing that you need to do is running it. If the node packages are not installed yet, the application will run npm install under the folder “ClientApp”, as seen in the following image:

Vue JS 3.0 with .NET 5 Web API - Visual Studio Marketplace Extension for Visual Studio - Project Template For Asp.Net Core 5 Web API and Vue JS 3, including examples for API…marketplace.visualstudio.com

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exciting part of .NET 5 isn’t new tech like Blazor, or its cross-platform support, or even its open-source status. It’s the fact that Microsoft has successfully pulled off a critical reboot. They’ve replaced the aging .NET Framework, revitalized the .NET family, and all-but guaranteed that their programming tools will thrive for another decade.

Then we raised our first institutional VC fund (just one of the ways in which we monetize our tech). If you have friends in venture and it looks like a cushy job, see if they’ve raised a first-time fund. It’s not as hard as being a CEO, but it is… not cushy. I was doing both — running a technology company while meeting with hundreds of institutional LPs around the world to raise a first-time VC fund. After the pivot, after the layoffs and after raising that $125m fund, we raised a meaningful round for the parent company from Temasek and TPG. I don’t know how we raised a big round from world-class investors right after a pivot, but we got it done.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alemalavasi Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandremalavasi/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-KFGgYiot1eA8QFqIgLmqA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexandre.malavasi.dev