why we're putting recognizd on pause for now

For those who have been following along, for the past 7 months Florian and I have been building recognizd in public. Sharing our journey step-by-step of building what we sincerely believed would be the future of work, aiming to change the lives of millions of people, for the better.?

The below tweet struck me 2 years ago and it kept coming up again as I considered how to best communicate our decision. The startup ecosystem is one of “insiders” and outsiders, and I consider it part of my duty as somewhat of an insider to help explain some of the things that nobody likes to tell you.?

Bear with me, this will be a long read :)?

There are so many reasons I could give to explain why we’re putting recognizd on pause right now and all are, to some degree, true:

• We don’t have enough personal runway to get where we need to go, in the time we have left
• The hiring market is sluggish right now, so default profitability isn’t possible
• We couldn’t raise enough VC money

All of these reasons are valid, but I’ve intentionally ordered them in that way. Personal runway doesn’t get talked about a whole lot. When we talk about a company’s “runway” we usually mean: how much money they have vs. how much money they need to operate, usually expressed in months.

Florian and I have been self-funding our company from day one (meaning: paying for any SaaS, AWS, marketing, design etc costs from our own pockets, and not paying ourselves a salary). This was only possible because I had a little bit of savings to lean on (I was an early-ish employee at a startup that had an exit) and Florian has access to the French government unemployment system which provides him with a small monthly payment. Both of us calculated how long we could survive with this set up before “running out” of personal funds. A note on this: how close should a founder get to total personal bankruptcy in pursuit of their vision? This particular question was a hard one for me personally - and something I’m happy to detail 1:1 offline, if any founder is struggling with this question themself.

Startup lore is filled with go-to examples of founders who were down to their last $10, living in their cars before finally making it big, their bets paying off - and are often used to shame founders considering stopping before using their absolute last dollar on their dream. The more mundane reality is: many startup founders (have the option to) move back in with family, have a spouse with a (high-paying) job supporting them, or have other generational resources to fall back on.?

A question that popped up a lot:

Why not just take money from angel investors?

We have been blessed with an incredible amount of support from day 1 from an amazing list of future (as we did not take their money yet) angel investors, who have provided advice, introductions, a shoulder to cry on, as well as the promise of financial support. People who were willing to put their own hard-earned money at risk, because they believed in me and in my vision. Many of these people started out as colleagues, all of them, I now consider as friends. Most opted in without ever seeing a deck, the fastest yes was given in the 5 minutes it took to walk from breakfast to a conference session. I will be forever grateful to all of you.

Risking my own money is one thing, risking that of others is another. While yes, angel investors are well aware of the risks they take, at our stage, an angel investment is an investment in me as a person, my vision and my ability to get our company to the next stage.

If I have lost some of that blind confidence that we will succeed - I can not in good conscience burn that capital (both real and social). I know many will disagree with this point. :)??

Why we couldn’t raise enough VC capital:

There are so many imperfect answers to this question, and the truth is, we will never know definitively, though I’m sure others will have opinions on this. In short:

• HR tech is a funding graveyard right now
• Consumer funding isn’t much better??
• Our vision and target use case isn’t super VC-compatible
• Maybe we just weren’t good enough at selling the vision?
• Maybe we stopped “too soon”?

On stopping too soon - we weighed the alternatives and found that continuing to pursue funding at this stage would mean: running myself into the ground financially, emotionally, physically, pitching everyone under the sun to raise on non-ideal terms, without being able to freely choose which long term partners accompany us on this journey. Fundraising is not a goal in and of itself, it’s a means to an end and the cost (personally, for the future of the company, to the mission we set out to achieve) we determined, was going to be too high.?

And when it truly comes down to it: I don’t enjoy spending time pitching investors. Fundraising is fun for absolutely no founders I believe, but I personally found it incredibly difficult and misaligned with the way I like to work. While I can dream big, I like to let my work and the facts speak for themselves. I am authentic and transparent to a fault. I’m stubborn and single-minded.?

I’m also a mission-driven founder, which means I was building a tech startup because I felt that was the best way to change the world of work for the greatest number of people and not because I fundamentally enjoy a challenge for the sake of a challenge, or because there’s nothing else I could picture myself doing.

Re: our vision being not super VC-compatible, we believe the future of work is b2c-first, but building venture-backed consumer products (that pursue exponential user growth and retention) requires making them sticky in a way that we couldn’t reconcile with our vision for the product, for who we wanted to serve, and how we wanted to go about it. We explicitly want to serve traditionally underserved populations like mums returning to the workforce and first-generation Americans, which added its own challenges to fundraising conversations.?

The lack of available risk capital for our product, at our stage, in the current market, combined with a vision approaching the dogmatic led us to wonder: are there other ways to achieve this mission?

So what’s next for recognizd??

We have a few thousand users, and every week at least one of you reaches out to tell me how we’ve changed your lives. That’s not nothing.?

In fact, that’s everything.?

So we will be keeping recognizd live, and continue adding features and content to it over the coming months and years. And build to our vision in a more sustainable (albeit, slower) way, while re-focusing on refilling our respective wells both financially and energetically.?

What’s next for me personally?

The cruelest irony or perhaps the sweetest salve of my own journey is realising that, actually, the thing I needed most when figuring out what to do next, was our very own product.

Building a startup requires an edge, an unwavering focus, a single-minded commitment. Not a lot of sleep, relentless optimisation of your own time and effort and a super-human level of optimism and motivation. Efficiency hacks. A lot of delivery food.?

So what’s next for me in the immediate term? Cultivating something softer. Leaning into my curiosity, being intentionally inefficient for just a little bit. Focusing on family, friends, my other business (oh yeah, I own and run a profitable brick and mortar business too, ICYMI) for a little while.

For Flo, this looks like focusing on freelance SWE work - if you need help on this front, I can’t recommend him enough.?

And then??

Well, recognizd was founded on the belief that individuals want to use their hard-won, highly specific skill set to access different and interesting new opportunities, and I plan to do exactly that. Use my skills (notably: a deep and generous understanding of humanity, an Australian-level work ethic and type of pragmatism, and the ability to build rapport with just about anyone) in a big problem space to make the world work just a little better.?

If you have something you think might interest me, I’m all ears :)?